Part 46 Entering Data Manually

46.1 Making data.frames or tibbles

In base R, we can make data frames using the data.frame() function. The tidyverse version is tibble::tibble(). tibble() is stricter by not allowing recycling unless the vector is of length 1.

Good:

dat <- tibble(
  x = 1:6,
  y = min(x)
)

Bad:

dat <- tibble(
  x = 1:6,
  y = 1:2
)

Manual construction of tibbles is convenient with tibble::tribble():

dat <- tribble(
  ~Day, ~Breakfast,
  1, "Apple",
  2, "Yogurt",
  3, "Yogurt"
)

46.2 datapasta

The datapasta package helps to reproducibly copy-paste data from spreadsheets into R. datapasta uses tribble().

install.packages("datapasta")

After you install the package, you can set keyboard shortcuts in RStudio for its functions:

1. Click Tools → Modify Keyboard Shortcuts…
2. Search for ‘paste’.
3. Set keyboard shortcuts for “Paste as tribble”, “Paste as vector”, and other functions if you like.

Now, try out pasting a vector and a tibble.