Skip to Content
Home » Language reference » write {base}

write {base}

Write Data to a File
Package: 
base
Version: 
R 3.0.1

Description

The data (usually a matrix) x are written to file file. If x is a two-dimensional matrix you need to transpose it to get the columns in file the same as those in the internal representation.

Usage

write(x, file = "data",
      ncolumns = if(is.character(x)) 1 else 5,
      append = FALSE, sep = " ")

Arguments

x
the data to be written out, usually an atomic vector.
file
A connection, or a character string naming the file to write to. If "", print to the standard output connection.
ncolumns
the number of columns to write the data in.
append
if TRUE the data x are appended to the connection.
sep
a string used to separate columns. Using sep = "\t" gives tab delimited output; default is " ".

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

write is a wrapper for cat, which gives further details on the format used.

save for writing any R objects, write.table for data frames, and scan for reading data.

Examples

# create a 2 by 5 matrix
x <- matrix(1:10, ncol = 5)
 
# the file data contains x, two rows, five cols
# 1 3 5 7 9 will form the first row
write(t(x))
 
# Writing to the "console" 'tab-delimited'
# two rows, five cols but the first row is 1 2 3 4 5
write(x, "", sep = "\t")
unlink("data") # tidy up

Documentation reproduced from R 3.0.1. License: GPL-2.