Write m-Path data to a CSV file

Save a data frame or tibble to a CSV file in the same format as the downloaded data from the m-Path website. This function is useful when you have made modifications to the original data and would like to save it in the same format. Note that reading back the data using read_mpath() may not always work, as the data may no longer be in line with the meta data of the original data file.

Usage

write_mpath(x, file, .progress = TRUE)

Arguments

x

A data frame or tibble to write to disk.

file

File or connection to write to.

.progress

Logical indicating whether to show a progress bar. Default is TRUE.

Value

Returns x invisibly.

Details

Even though saving a data frame to a CSV file may seem trivial, there are several issues that need to be addressed when saving m-Path data. The main issue is that m-Path data contains list columns that need to be "collapsed" to a single string before they can be saved to a CSV file. This function collapses most list columns to a single string using paste() with commas as a delimiter of the values. However, for columns that contain strings, this is not possible as the strings themselves may contains commas as well. To address this, the function converts all character columns to JSON strings using jsonlite::toJSON() before saving them to disk.

While write_mpath() aims to provide a similar CSV file as the m-Path dashboard, we cannot provide any guarantees that the data can be read back using read_mpath(), especially when the data has been modified. If you want to save the data to use it at a later point in R (even when transferring it to another computer), we recommend using saveRDS() or save() instead.

Note that the resulting data file may not exactly be equal to the original, even if it was not modified after reading it with read_mpath(). The main reason is that CSV files from the m-Path dashboard do not contain all necessary file delimiters corresponding to the number of rows in the data. This function, however, does contain the correct number of file delimiters which makes the files slightly bigger compared to the original file.

See also

read_mpath() to read m-Path data into R.

Examples

data <- read_mpath(
  mpath_example("example_basic.csv"),
  mpath_example("example_meta.csv")
)
write_mpath(data, "data.csv")