在R中写入CSV文件时的定界符

Question

How can I use | (pipe) as a delimiter while writing csv files in R?

When I try writing a data set into a file with write.csv with sep = "|" , it ignores the separator and writes the file simply as a comma separated file.

Also write.csv2 also doesn't seem to cover the other variety of characters which could be used as a separator.

Is there a way to use other characters such as ^, $, ~, ¬ or |, as a delimiter while writing a csv file in R.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You have to understand that .csv means "comma-separated value" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values .

If you want to export with a separator using that characters you need another function.

For example, using write.table , and you'll be able to load this file with R , Excel ,....

write.table(data, "data.txt", sep = "|")
data_load <- read.table("data.txt", sep = "|")

Feel free to use any character as separator.

Or you could force this plain text to be .csv

write.table(data, "data.csv", sep = "|")
data_load <- read.csv("data.csv", sep = "|")

Answer 2

This answer is just a variation of the one I gave for this question . They are similar, but I don't think the question itself is an exact duplicate, but they are both part of a bigger question (not yet asked).

In the help for write.table , it states:

write.csv and write.csv2 provide convenience wrappers for writing CSV files.

...

These wrappers are deliberately inflexible: they are designed to ensure that the correct conventions are used to write a valid file. Attempts to change append, col.names, sep, dec or qmethod are ignored, with a warning.

To set sep or another of these parameters you need to use write.table instead of write.csv .