Converting file formats using the rio package

As we saw in the previous recipe, Rio is an R package developed by Thomas J. Leeper which makes the import and export of data really easy. You can refer to the previous recipe for more on its core functionalities and logic.

Besides the import() and export() functions, Rio also offers a really well-conceived and straightforward file conversion facility through the convert() function, which we are going to leverage in this recipe.

Getting ready

First of all, we need to install and make the rio package available by running the following code:

install.packages("rio")
library(rio)

In the following example, we are going to import the world_gdp_data dataset from a local .csv file. This dataset is provided within the RStudio project related to this book, in the data folder.

You can download it by authenticating your account at http://packtpub.com.

How to do it...

1. The first step is to convert the file from the .csv format to the .json format:

   convert("world_gdp_data.csv", "world_gdp_data.json")

   This will create a new file without removing the original one.

2. The next step is to remove the original file:

   file.remove("world_gdp_data.csv")

There's more...

As fully illustrated within the Rio vignette (which you can find at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rio/vignettes/rio.html), the following formats are supported for import and export:

Format	Import	Export
Tab-separated data (.tsv)	Yes	Yes
Comma-separated data (.csv)	Yes	Yes
CSVY (CSV + YAML metadata header) (.csvy)	Yes	Yes
Pipe-separated data (.psv)	Yes	Yes
Fixed-width format data (.fwf)	Yes	Yes
Serialized R objects (.rds)	Yes	Yes
Saved R objects (.RData)	Yes	Yes
JSON (.json)	Yes	Yes
YAML (.yml)	Yes	Yes
Stata (.dta)	Yes	Yes
SPSS and SPSS portable	Yes (.sav and .por)	Yes (.sav only)
XBASE database files (.dbf)	Yes	Yes
Excel (.xls)	Yes
Excel (.xlsx)	Yes	Yes
Weka Attribute-Relation File Format (.arff)	Yes	Yes
R syntax (.r)	Yes	Yes
Shallow XML documents (.xml)	Yes	Yes
SAS (.sas7bdat)	Yes
SAS XPORT (.xpt)	Yes
Minitab (.mtp)	Yes
Epiinfo (.rec)	Yes
Systat (.syd)	Yes
Data Interchange Format (.dif)	Yes
OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)	Yes
Fortran data (no recognized extension)	Yes
Google Sheets	Yes
Clipboard (default is .tsv)

Since rio is still a growing package, I strongly suggest that you follow its development on its GitHub repository, where you will easily find out when new formats are added, at https://github.com/leeper/rio.