Scan and Read Data from a File in R Programming - scan() Function Last Updated : 15 Jul, 2025 Comments Improve Suggest changes 1 Likes Like Report scan() function in R Language is used to scan and read data. It is usually used to read data into vector or list or from file in R Language. Syntax: scan("data.txt", what = "character") Parameter: data.txt: Text file to be scanned Returns: Scanned output Example 1: Scanning of Text r # R Program to scan a file # Create example data.frame data <- data.frame(x1 = c(1, 2, 2, 3), x2 = c(4, 5, 6, 7), x3 = c(8, 9, 10, 11)) data # Write data as txt file to directory write.table(data, file = "data.txt", row.names = FALSE) # Get currently used directory getwd() # Apply scan function to txt file data <- scan("data.txt", what = "character") data Output : x1 x2 x3 1 1 4 8 2 2 5 9 3 2 6 10 4 3 7 11 [1] "/home/cg/root/8121844" [1] "x1" "x2" "x3" "1" "4" "8" "2" "5" "9" "2" "6" "10" "3" "7" "11" Read 15 items Example 2: Scan data as text r # R Program to scan a file # Create example data.frame data <- data.frame(x1 = c(1, 2, 2, 3), x2 = c(4, 5, 6, 7), x3 = c(8, 9, 10, 11)) data # Write data as txt file to directory write.table(data, file = "data.txt", row.names = FALSE) # Read txt file into list data <- scan("data.txt", what = list("", "", "")) data Output: x1 x2 x3 1 1 4 8 2 2 5 9 3 2 6 10 4 3 7 11 [[1]] [1] "x1" "1" "2" "2" "3" [[2]] [1] "x2" "4" "5" "6" "7" [[3]] [1] "x3" "8" "9" "10" "11" Read 5 records Example 3: Skip lines with scan function r # R Program to scan a file # Create example data.frame data <- data.frame(x1 = c(1, 2, 2, 3), x2 = c(4, 5, 6, 7), x3 = c(8, 9, 10, 11)) data # Write data as txt file to directory write.table(data, file = "data.txt", row.names = FALSE) # Skip first line of txt file data <- scan("data.txt", skip = 1) data Output: x1 x2 x3 1 1 4 8 2 2 5 9 3 2 6 10 4 3 7 11 [1] 1 4 8 2 5 9 2 6 10 3 7 11 Read 12 items Example 4: Scan Excel CSV File r # R Program to scan a file # Create example data.frame data <- data.frame(x1 = c(1, 2, 2, 3), x2 = c(4, 5, 6, 7), x3 = c(8, 9, 10, 11)) data # Write data as csv file to directory write.table(data, file = "data.csv", row.names = FALSE) # Apply scan function to csv file data <- scan("data.csv", what = "character") data Output: x1 x2 x3 x1 x2 x3 1 1 4 8 2 2 5 9 3 2 6 10 4 3 7 11 Read 15 items [1] "x1" "x2" "x3" "1" "4" "8" "2" "5" "9" "2" "6" "10" "3" "7" "11" Example 5: Read input from the keyboard. r # take input from keyboard z <- scan() 1 2 3 4 # print output on the screen print(z) Output: Read 4 items [1] 1 2 3 4 Here, in the above code, the scan() function will take input from the user and print value using the print() function. 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