Read a file into R filtering it with an sql statement. Only the filtered
portion is processed by R so that files larger than R can otherwise
handle can be accommodated.
A file path or a URL (beginning with http:// or ftp://). If
the filter argument is used and no file is to be input to the filter
then file can be omitted, NULL, NA or "".
sql
character string holding an SQL statement. The table representing the
file should be referred to as file.
header
As in read.csv.
sep
As in read.csv.
row.names
As in read.csv.
eol
Character which ends line.
skip
Skip indicated number of lines in input file.
filter
If specified, this should be a shell/batch command that the input file is piped through. For read.csv2.sql it is by default the following on non-Windows systems: tr , .. This translates all commas in the file to dots. On Windows similar functionalty is provided but to do that using a vbscript file that is included with sqldf to emulate the tr command.
nrows
Number of rows used to determine column types. It defaults to 50. Using
-1 causes it to use all rows for determining column types.
This argument is rarely needed.
field.types
A list whose names are the column names and whose
contents are the SQLite types (not the R class names) of the
columns. Specifying these types improves how fast it takes.
Unless speed is very important this argument is not normally used.
colClasses
As in read.csv.
dbname
As in sqldf except that the default is tempfile().
Specifying NULL will put the database in memory which may improve speed
but will limit the size of the database by the available memory.
drv
This argument is ignored.
Currently the only database SQLite supported by read.csv.sql and
read.csv2.sql is SQLite.
Note that the H2 database has a builtin SQL function,
CSVREAD, which can be used in place of read.csv.sql.
...
Passed to sqldf.
Details
Reads the indicated file into an sql database creating the database
if it does not already exist. Then it applies the sql statement
returning the result as a data frame. If the database did not exist
prior to this statement it is removed.
Note that it uses facilities of SQLite to read the file
which are intended for speed and therefore
not as flexible as in R. For example, it does not
recognize quoted fields as special but will regard the quotes as
part of the field. See the
sqldf help for more information.
read.csv2.sql is like read.csv.sql except
the default sep is ";" and the default filter translates
all commas in the file to decimal points (i.e. to dots).
On Windows, if the filter argument is used and if Rtools is detected
in the registry then the Rtools bin directory is added to the search path
facilitating use of those tools without explicitly setting any the path.
Value
If the sql statement is a select statement then a data frame
is returned.
Examples
## Not run:
# might need to specify eol= too depending on your system
write.csv(iris, "iris.csv", quote = FALSE, row.names = FALSE)
iris2 <- read.csv.sql("iris.csv",
sql = "select * from file where Species = 'setosa' ")
## End(Not run)