Write lines of text to a file in R

Question

In the R scripting language  how do I write lines of text  e g  the following two lines  Hello World   to a file named  output txt

User · Answer

I suggest   writeLines c  Hello   World     output txt     It is shorter and more direct than the current accepted answer  It is not necessary to do   fileConn lt -file  output txt     writeLines command using fileConn connection close fileConn    Because the documentation for writeLines   says      If the con is a character string  the function calls file to obtain   a file connection which is opened for the duration of the function   call      default settings for writeLines    sep     n   useBytes   FALSE   so  sep      would join all together e g

User · Answer

Actually you can do it with sink     sink  outfile txt   cat  hello   cat   n   cat  world   sink     hence do   file show  outfile txt     hello   world

User · Answer

I would use the cat   command as in this example    gt  cat  Hello  file  outfile txt  sep   n    gt  cat  World  file  outfile txt  append TRUE    You can then view the results from with R with   gt  file show  outfile txt   hello world

User · Answer

To round out the possibilities  you can use writeLines   with sink    if you want      gt  sink  tempsink   type  output    gt  writeLines  Hello nWorld    gt  sink    gt  file show  tempsink   delete file TRUE  Hello World   To me  it always seems most intuitive to use print    but if you do that the output won t be what you want          gt  print  Hello nWorld        1   Hello nWorld

User · Answer

You could do that in a single statement  cat  hello   world  file  output txt  sep   n  append TRUE

User · Answer

fileConn lt -file  output txt   writeLines c  Hello   World    fileConn  close fileConn

User · Answer

What about a simple write table     text   c  Hello    World   write table text  file    output txt   col names   F  row names   F  quote   F    The parameters col names   FALSE and row names   FALSE make sure to exclude the row and column names in the txt  and the parameter quote   FALSE excludes those quotation marks at the beginning and end of each line in the txt  To read the data back in  you can use text   readLines  output txt

User · Answer

In newer versions of R  writeLines will preserve returns and spaces in your text  so you don t need to include  n at the end of lines and you can write one big chunk of text to a file  This will work with the example   txt  lt -  Hello World  fileConn lt -file  output txt   writeLines txt  fileConn  close fileConn    But you could also use this setup to simply include text with structure  linebreaks or indents   txt  lt -  Hello    world  I can     indent text   fileConn lt -file  output txt   writeLines txt  fileConn  close fileConn

User · Answer

Based on the best answer   file  lt - file  test txt   writeLines yourObject  file  close file    Note that the yourObject needs to be in a string format  use as character   to convert if you need   But this is too much typing for every save attempt  Let s create a snippet in RStudio   In Global Options    Code    Snippet  type this   snippet wfile     file  lt - file   1 filename       writeLines   2 yourObject   file      close file    Then  during coding  type wfile and press Tab

User · Answer

tidyverse edition with pipe and write lines   from readr  library tidyverse  c  Hello    World     gt   write lines   output txt

User · Answer

Short ways to write lines of text to a file in R could be realised with cat or writeLines as already shown in many answers  Some of the shortest possibilities might be  cat  quot Hello nWorld quot   file  quot output txt quot   writeLines  quot Hello nWorld quot    quot output txt quot    In case you don t like the  quot  n quot  you could also use the following style  cat  quot Hello World quot   file  quot output txt quot    writeLines  quot Hello World quot    quot output txt quot    While writeLines adds a newline at the end of the file what is not the case for cat  This behaviour could be adjusted by  writeLines  quot Hello nWorld quot    quot output txt quot   sep  quot  quot    No newline at end of file cat  quot Hello nWorld n quot   file  quot output txt quot    Newline at end of file cat  quot Hello nWorld quot   file  quot output txt quot   sep  quot  n quot    Newline at end of file  But main difference is that cat uses R objects and writeLines a character vector as argument  So writing out e g  the numbers 1 10 needs to be casted for writeLines while it can be used as it is in cat  cat 1 10  writeLines as character 1 10    and cat can take many objects but writeLines only one vector  cat  quot Hello quot    quot World quot   sep  quot  n quot   writeLines c  quot Hello quot    quot World quot

User · Answer

What s about a simple writeLines     txt  lt -  Hallo nWorld  writeLines txt   outfile txt     or  txt  lt - c  Hallo    World   writeLines txt   outfile txt

User · Answer

The ugly system option  ptf  lt - function  txtToPrint outFile  system paste paste paste  echo    cat txtToPrint  sep      collapse   NULL     gt   sep      collapse   NULL  outFile     Prints txtToPrint to outFile in cwd     bin bash echo txtToPrint  gt  outFile

[file-io] Write lines of text to a file in R

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