R-data (Import_Export)

Reading data into a statistical system for analysis and exporting the results to some other system for report writing can be frustrating tasks that can take far more time than the statistical analysis itself, even though most readers will find the latter far more appealing.
This manual describes the import and export facilities available either in R itself or via packages which are available from CRAN or elsewhere. Unless otherwise stated, everything described in this manual is (at least in principle) available on all platforms running R.
In general, statistical systems like R are not particularly well suited to manipulations of large-scale data. Some other systems are better than R at this, and part of the thrust of this manual is to suggest that rather than duplicating functionality in R we can make another system do the work! (For example Therneau & Grambsch (2000) comment that they prefer to do data manipulation in SAS and then use survival in S for the analysis.) Database manipulation systems are often very suitable for manipulating an extracting data: several packages to interact with DBMSs are discussed here.
There are packages to allow functionality developed in languages such as Java, perl and python to be directly integrated with R code, making the use of facilities in these languages even more appropriate. (See the rJava package from CRAN and the SJava, RSPerl and RSPython packages from the Omegahat project, http://www.omegahat.org.)