As we saw in the previous recipe, Rio is an R package developed by Thomas J. Leeper which makes the import and export of data really easy. You can refer to the previous recipe for more on its core functionalities and logic.
Besides the import() and export() functions, Rio also offers a really well-conceived and straightforward file conversion facility through the convert() function, which we are going to leverage in this recipe.
Getting ready
First of all, we need to install and make the rio package available by running the following code:
install.packages("rio")
library(rio)
In the following example, we are going to import the world_gdp_data dataset from a local .csv file. This dataset is provided within the RStudio project related to this book, in the data folder.
Since rio is still a growing package, I strongly suggest that you follow its development on its GitHub repository, where you will easily find out when new formats are added, at https://github.com/leeper/rio.