What can R do about a messy data format?

Question

Sometimes I see data posted in a Stack Overflow question formatted like in this question. This is not the first time, so I have decided to ask a question about it, and

Answer 1

As it was suggested, you could use dput to save the content of a dataframe to a file, open the file in a text editor and paste its content. An example of mtcar's dataset limited to first 10 rows:

dput(mtcars  %>% head(10), file = 'reproducible.txt')

The content of reproducible.txt can be used to make a dataframe/tibble as shown below. In such a case data the format is machine readable, but it is hard to be undestood by human at first glance (without pasting into R).

df <- structure(list(mpg = c(21, 21, 22.8, 21.4, 18.7, 18.1, 14.3,
24.4, 22.8, 19.2), cyl = c(6, 6, 4, 6, 8, 6, 8, 4, 4, 6), disp = c(160,
160, 108, 258, 360, 225, 360, 146.7, 140.8, 167.6), hp = c(110,
110, 93, 110, 175, 105, 245, 62, 95, 123), drat = c(3.9, 3.9,
3.85, 3.08, 3.15, 2.76, 3.21, 3.69, 3.92, 3.92), wt = c(2.62,
2.875, 2.32, 3.215, 3.44, 3.46, 3.57, 3.19, 3.15, 3.44), qsec = c(16.46,
17.02, 18.61, 19.44, 17.02, 20.22, 15.84, 20, 22.9, 18.3), vs = c(0,
0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1), am = c(1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
0), gear = c(4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4), carb = c(4, 4, 1,
1, 2, 1, 4, 2, 2, 4)), .Names = c("mpg", "cyl", "disp", "hp",
"drat", "wt", "qsec", "vs", "am", "gear", "carb"), row.names = c("Mazda RX4",
"Mazda RX4 Wag", "Datsun 710", "Hornet 4 Drive", "Hornet Sportabout",
"Valiant", "Duster 360", "Merc 240D", "Merc 230", "Merc 280"), class = "data.frame")