Tips on accessing data from various sources with R

Jeffrey Breen (the man behind the Twitter airline sentiment analysis example) recently posted a collection of slides with some great tips for accessing data from R. "Tapping the Data Deluge" includes information on:

• Using the XLConnect package to read data from Excel spreadsheets
• Using the foreign package to read SPSS, SAS, Stata and dBase data files
• Using SQL queries to import data from MySQL with the RMySQL package
• Accessing unstructured data in Hadoop with rhbase
• Scraping data from websites via direct URLs and the XML package (to parse HTML tables)
• Accessing public data sources (economic, financial, social, etc.)

Many thanks to Jeffrey for preparing and sharing this useful information. I've embedded the slides below, and you can find more information, including R code implementing the examples, at Jeffrey's blog linked below.

Jeffrey Breen: Slides from “Tapping the Data Deluge with R” lightning talk

Comments

[John]

Good post, useful tips.
Thanks for sharing it.