R data formats: RData, Rda, Rds etc

r r-faq rdata rda
Carlos Cinelli picture Carlos Cinelli · Jan 26, 2014 · Viewed 130.3k times · Source

What are the main differences between .RData, .Rda and .Rds files?

More specifically:

  • Are there differences in compression etc?
  • When should each type be used?
  • How to convert one type to another?

Answer

KenM picture KenM · Jan 26, 2014

Rda is just a short name for RData. You can just save(), load(), attach(), etc. just like you do with RData.

Rds stores a single R object. Yet, beyond that simple explanation, there are several differences from a "standard" storage. Probably this R-manual Link to readRDS() function clarifies such distinctions sufficiently.

So, answering your questions:

  • The difference is not about the compression, but serialization (See this page)
  • Like shown in the manual page, you may wanna use it to restore a certain object with a different name, for instance.
  • You may readRDS() and save(), or load() and saveRDS() selectively.

Related questions

Remove rows with all or some NAs (missing values) in data.frame

I'd like to remove the lines in this data frame that: a) contain NAs across all columns. Below is my example data frame. gene hsap mmul mmus rnor cfam 1 ENSG00000208234 0 NA NA NA NA 2 ENSG00000199674 0 2 2 2 2 3 ENSG00000221622 0 NA NA NA NA 4 …

Read More
Drop data frame columns by name

I have a number of columns that I would like to remove from a data frame. I know that we can delete them individually using something like: df$x <- NULL But I was hoping to do this with …

Read More
Plot two graphs in same plot in R

I would like to plot y1 and y2 in the same plot. x <- seq(-2, 2, 0.05) y1 <- pnorm(x) y2 <- pnorm(x, 1, 1) plot(x, y1, type = "l", col = "red") plot(x, y2, type = "l", col = "…

Read More