Exporting Data

R can also export R data objects (usually data frames and matrices) as text files. To export data to a text file, use the write.table function:

write.table(x, file = "", append = FALSE, quote = TRUE, sep = " ",
            eol = "\n", na = "NA", dec = ".", row.names = TRUE,
            col.names = TRUE, qmethod = c("escape", "double"))

There are wrapper functions for write.table that call write.table with different defaults. These are useful if you want to create a file of comma-separated values, for example, to import into Microsoft Excel:

write.csv(...)
write.csv2(...)

Here is a description of the arguments to write.table.

Argument	Description	Default
x	Object to export.
file	Character value specifying a filename or a connection object to which you would like to write the output.	""
append	A logical value indicating whether to append the output to the end of an existing file (append=TRUE) or replace the file (append=FALSE).	FALSE
quote	A logical value specifying whether to surround any character or factor values with quotes, or a numeric vector specifying which columns to surround with quotes.	TRUE
sep	A character value specifying the value that separates values within a row.	""
eol	A character value specifying the value to append on the end of each line.	"\n"
na	A character value specifying how to represent NA values.	"NA"
dec	A character value specifying the decimal separator in numeric values.	"."
row.names	A logical value indicating whether to include row names in the output or a numeric vector specifying the rows from which row names should be included.	TRUE
col.names	A logical value specifying whether to include column names or a character vector specifying alternate names to include.	TRUE
qmethod	Specifies how to deal with quotes inside quoted character and factor fields. Specify qmethod="escape" to escape quotes with a backslash (as in C) or qmethod="double" to escape quotes as double quotes (i.e., “ is transformed to “”).	"escape"