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Your Turn

You’ll be working with data on Oregon school enrollment by race/ethnicity.

Create a new project. Make sure you put it somewhere you’ll be able to find it again later!

Download the two files using the download.file() function into a data-raw folder (which you’ll need to create).

Create a new R script file where you’ll do all of your data cleaning work

Import the two spreadsheets into two data frames (enrollment_17_18 and enrollment_18_19)

Heads Up!

If you have issues opening the spreadsheet, note that you may need to add the argument mode = "wb" to the download.file() function, as follows (read more about why here). You can see the full code in the solutions section below if necessary.

Learn More

You can read about all of the arguments for the download.file() function here.

To learn more about importing Excel files, check out the readxl package documentation. You’ll see, for example, ways to download only certain ranges of cells, which can be helpful when you have messy Excel data!

I’ve also written an article about cleaning messy data in R. There are many packages to deal with messy data (which often comes in the form of Excel spreadsheets), and I go through several in the post.

Have any questions? Put them below and we will help you out!

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Jody Oconnor

Jody Oconnor

April 20, 2021

fyi - I was able to download both .xlsx files, but when creating objects with the 17-18 data I got this error message: > download.file(url = "https://github.com/rfortherestofus/going-deeper/raw/master/data-raw/enrollment-17-18.xlsx",

  •           destfile = "data-raw/enrollment-17-18.xlsx")
    

trying URL 'https://github.com/rfortherestofus/going-deeper/raw/master/data-raw/enrollment-17-18.xlsx' Content type 'application/octet-stream' length 47088 bytes (45 KB) downloaded 45 KB

> enrollment_17_18 %

  • clean_names() Error: Evaluation error: zip file 'data-raw/enrollment-17-18.xlsx' cannot be opened.

I was able to download the file to my computer, then copy it into the 'data-raw' folder manually and turn it into an object with R script successfully. So I'm moving on with the assignment but thought you would want to know.

Abby Isaacson

Abby Isaacson

April 20, 2021

I am having a problem just downloading the files. My code (with or without the mode = "wb",):

download.file(url = "https://github.com/rfortherestofus/going-deeper/raw/master/data-raw/enrollment-18-19.xlsx", destfile = "data-raw-gd/going-deeper/raw/master/data-raw/enrollment-18-19.xlsx")

and I get these two errors:

Warning messages: 1: In download.file(url = "https://github.com/rfortherestofus/going-deeper/raw/master/data-raw/enrollment-18-19.xlsx", : URL https://github.com/rfortherestofus/going-deeper/raw/master/data-raw/enrollment-18-19.xlsx: cannot open destfile 'data-raw/enrollment-18-19.xlsx', reason 'No such file or directory' 2: In download.file(url = "https://github.com/rfortherestofus/going-deeper/raw/master/data-raw/enrollment-18-19.xlsx", : download had nonzero exit status

This also happens with my own project file links (from Tidy Tuesday).

Nithin Pradeep

Nithin Pradeep

October 8, 2021

The excel file I am downloading is not getting opened in excel. The following dialog box appears-"file format or file extension not valid. Verify the file has not been corrupted and that file extension matches the format".

You recommended data cleaning in R script but reporting in RMarkdown. What if I want my report to be 100% reproducible by someone else? Should I then do all my data cleaning within RMarkdown?

At about 9:38 you said “let me highlight all of these” because keyboard shortcuts are faster. Did you use CTRL A to select all or something else to select just that chunk/those lines?

Niger Sultana

Niger Sultana

April 28, 2022

Hi David, What was your key at 12:38 second, that hash tag showed up before two lines R code ?

Niger Sultana

Niger Sultana

April 29, 2022

Hi I was trying to import data from two excels(field_data_AA and predictor season13July) where 4 spread sheets (name are Autumn, Spring, Winter and Summer. I found following messages. I first run code with Spring and data imported then run code with all seasons? It did not work. Can you suggest me please how can I fix cell reference in excel files ?

> field_data_2018
> field_data_2019 <- read_excel(path = "Data-raw/predictor season13July.xlsx",

  •                           sheet = &quot;Autumn&quot;,&quot;Spring&quot;,&quot;Winter&quot;,&quot;Summer&quot;)
    

Error: Can't guess format of this cell reference: Spring In addition: Warning message: Cell reference follows neither the A1 nor R1C1 format. Example: Spring NAs generated.

Cheers Niger

Esther Okoye

Esther Okoye

May 5, 2022

Hello whenever i try to run my code it keeps giving me an error mesage;

source("~/.active-rstudio-document", echo=TRUE) Error in source("~/.active-rstudio-document", echo = TRUE) : ~/.active-rstudio-document:6:107: unexpected symbol 5: 6: download.file(url="https://github.com/rfortherestofus/going-deeper/raw/master/data-raw/enrollment-mode = "wb ^

What's the difference between the "destfile" argument and "dest" in read_excel, which seems to have also put my downloads into the folder I directed them to? Are they two ways of doing the same thing?

Kirstin O'Dell

Kirstin O'Dell

November 2, 2022

I'm having trouble reading in the files. This is the error message:

> enrollment_18_19 <- read_excel(path = "data-raw/enrollment-18-19.xlsx",

  •                            sheet = &quot;Sheet 1&quot;)
    

Error in utils::unzip(zip_path, list = TRUE) : error -103 with zipfile in unzGetCurrentFileInfo

Amanda Krantz

Amanda Krantz

November 2, 2022

I was able to download the files, but when I go to view them before import, I receive an error that "the file format or extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file."

Amanda Krantz

Amanda Krantz

November 2, 2022

Disregard! I had noticed the wb code addition in the comments, but I realized I needed to add it to the download not the import.

Michelle Gichuru

Michelle Gichuru

November 22, 2022

Would we use the same process to download a Google Sheet file?

Thanks for the note on Markdown vs Script, I thought it was only me 😁. Agree with your suggestion, makes sense 🙏🏼