Importing R data
We will use pyreadr to read an R data file into pandas. Since pyreadr cannot capture the metadata, we will write code to reconstruct value labels (analogous to R factors) and column headings. This is similar to what we did in the Importing data from SQL databases recipe.
The R statistical package is, in many ways, similar to the combination of Python and pandas, at least in its scope. Both have strong tools across a range of data preparation and data analysis tasks. Some data scientists work with both R and Python, perhaps doing data manipulation in Python and statistical analysis in R, or vice-versa, depending on their preferred packages. But there is currently a scarcity of tools for reading data saved in R, as rds or rdata files, into Python. The analyst often saves the data as a CSV file first, and then loads the CSV file into Python. We will use pyreadr, from the same author as pyreadstat, because it does not require an installation of R.
When we receive...
