How to Read a CSV File in R

Reading CSV files is one of the most common data import tasks in R.

With readr

The tidyverse readr package provides read_csv():

library(readr)
df <- read_csv("data.csv")
# # A tibble: 100 x 5

From a URL:

df <- read_csv("https://example.com/data.csv")

Specify column types:

df <- read_csv("data.csv", col_types = cols(
  id = col_integer(),
  name = col_character()
))

With base R

df <- read.csv("data.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

For large files, use data.table::fread():

library(data.table)
df <- fread("data.csv")
#    id  name value
# 1:  1 Alice  10.5

See Also

• data.frame — Base R data frame
• tibble — Tidyverse tibble