How to Write a Data Frame to CSV in R

Writing data frames to CSV files is a standard task in R. Here are the main ways to do it.

With readr

The tidyverse readr package provides write_csv():

library(readr)
write_csv(df, "output.csv")

This writes without row names and handles strings cleanly.

With base R

write.csv(df, "output.csv", row.names = FALSE)

Set row.names = FALSE to avoid writing an X1 column with row numbers.

With data.table

For large datasets, data.table::fwrite() is significantly faster:

library(data.table)
fwrite(df, "output.csv")
# 0.26 sec for 1M rows

See Also

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