How to point to a directory in an R package?

Question

I am making my first attempts to write a R package. I am loading one csv file from hard drive and I am hoping to bundle up my R codes and my csv files into one package later.

My question is how can I load my csv file when my pakage is generated, I mean right now my file address is something like c:\R\mydirectory....\myfile.csv but after I sent it to someone else how can I have a relative address to that file?

Feel free to correct this question if it is not clear to others!

Answer 1

You can put your csv files in the data directory or in inst/extdata. See the Writing R Extensions manual - Section 1.1.5 Data in packages.

To import the data you can use, e.g.,

R> data("achieve", package="flexclust")

or

R> read.table(system.file("data/achieve.txt", package = "flexclust"))

Answer 2

Look at the R help for package.skeleton: this function

automates some of the setup for a new source package. It creates directories, saves functions, data, and R code files to appropriate places, and creates skeleton help files and a ‘Read-and-delete-me’ file describing further steps in packaging.

The directory structure created by package.skeleton includes a data directory. If you put your data here it will be distributed with the package.