Read a CSV from Github into R

Read a CSV from github into R

Try this:

library(RCurl)
x <- getURL("https://raw.github.com/aronlindberg/latent_growth_classes/master/LGC_data.csv")
y <- read.csv(text = x)

You have two problems:

  1. You're not linking to the "raw" text file, but Github's display version (visit the URL for https:\raw.github.com....csv to see the difference between the raw version and the display version).
  2. https is a problem for R in many cases, so you need to use a package like RCurl to get around it. In some cases (not with Github, though) you can simply replace https with http and things work out, so you can always try that out first, but I find using RCurl reliable and not too much extra typing.

I'm trying to read in a csv file from github in R. However, when I try to get the names of the columns, I only get one name

When reading data from github, you need to pass in the raw version of the data in read.csv(), you are using the display version. You can get the URL for the raw version by clicking on the Raw button displayed above the data.

Sample Image

movies <- read.csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fivethirtyeight/data/master/fandango/fandango_score_comparison.csv", header=TRUE)


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