How to get a .csv file into R?

Question

I have this .csv file:

ID,GRADES,GPA,Teacher,State

3,\"C\",2,\"Teacher3\",\"MA\"

1,\"A\",4,\"Teacher1\",\"California\"

And what I want to

Answer 1

As Dirk said, the function you are after is 'read.csv' or one of the other read.table variants. Given your sample data above, I think you will want to do something like this:

setwd("c:/random/directory")

df <- read.csv("myRandomFile.csv", header=TRUE)

All we did in the above was set the directory to where your .csv file is and then read the .csv into a dataframe named df. You can check that the data loaded properly by checking the structure of the object with:

str(df)

Assuming the data loaded properly, you can think go on to perform any number of statistical methods with the data in your data frame. I think summary(df) would be a good place to start. Learning how to use the help in R will be immensely useful, and a quick read through the help on CRAN will save you lots of time in the future: http://cran.r-project.org/