CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Acarbalacar
Acarbalacar

Reputation: 734

R creates a list, instead of a data frame

I want to write a data frame to a file using the write function, however this doesnt work, because data.frame() creates it as a list.

Reproductive example:

data <- data.frame(cbind(1:2,3:4))
typeof(data)
data
#  X1 X2
#1  1  3
#2  2  4
#> typeof(data)
#[1] "list"

Now when I want to write to file using

write(data,"data.txt")

I get an error saying

Error in cat(list(...), file, sep, fill, labels, append) : argument 1 (type 'list') cannot be handled by 'cat'

Which obviously happens because data is a list, but I dont understand why it is a list. Im running R 3.1.3

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2454

Answers (3)

Ray
Ray

Reputation: 39

A data.frame is a list of vector structures of the same length. You can use typeof (df) to see that it shows the type of df (here an example data.frame) as "list".

You can use write.table to write a data.frame to a text file as shown below:

write.table(df, "filename.txt", sep = "\t", row.names = FALSE)

Upvotes: 1

thothal
thothal

Reputation: 20329

Actually, your data is a data.frame:

class(data)
# [1] "data.frame"

The problem is that write does not cope well with data frames, but would work with matrices:

write(as.matrix(data), "test.txt")

If you want to write the data frame to a file use write.table:

write.table(data, "test.txt")

The error message comes from the underlying cat function and the fact that a data.frame is conceptually a list of vectors of same length.

Upvotes: 6

GyD
GyD

Reputation: 4072

How about write.table(data,"data.txt")?

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions