Write lines of text to a file in R

Question

In the R scripting language, how do I write lines of text, e.g. the following two lines

Hello
World

to a file named "output.txt"?

Answer 1

Based on the best answer:

file <- file("test.txt")
writeLines(yourObject, file)
close(file)

Note that the yourObject needs to be in a string format; use as.character() to convert if you need.

But this is too much typing for every save attempt. Let's create a snippet in RStudio.

In Global Options >> Code >> Snippet, type this:

snippet wfile
    file <- file(${1:filename})
    writeLines(${2:yourObject}, file)
    close(file)

Then, during coding, type wfile and press Tab.

Answer 2

The ugly system option

ptf <- function (txtToPrint,outFile){system(paste(paste(paste("echo '",cat(txtToPrint),sep = "",collapse = NULL),"'>",sep = "",collapse = NULL),outFile))}
#Prints txtToPrint to outFile in cwd. #!/bin/bash echo txtToPrint > outFile

Answer 3

What's about a simple writeLines()?

txt <- "Hallo\nWorld"
writeLines(txt, "outfile.txt")

or

txt <- c("Hallo", "World")
writeLines(txt, "outfile.txt")

Answer 4

You could do that in a single statement

cat("hello","world",file="output.txt",sep="\n",append=TRUE)

Answer 5

Actually you can do it with sink():

sink("outfile.txt")
cat("hello")
cat("\n")
cat("world")
sink()

hence do:

file.show("outfile.txt")
# hello
# world

Answer 6

I would use the cat() command as in this example:

> cat("Hello",file="outfile.txt",sep="\n")
> cat("World",file="outfile.txt",append=TRUE)

You can then view the results from with R with

> file.show("outfile.txt")
hello
world