Read an R object from a Box file

box_read will download a file specified by file_id, and attempt to read it into memory as an R object. This can be useful, for example, to read in a .csv file as a data.frame().

Converting a file to an R object is by default handled by rio::import() function. The only modification of it's behavior is that json files are not neccesarily coerced to data.frames, but can used to store list data, too. In addtion, more specific read functions are provided:

• box_read_csv - Reads remote .csv files as data.frame()s (via read.csv())

• box_read_tsv - Reads remote .tsv files as data.frame()s (via read.delim())

• box_read_json - Reads remote .json files as list()s (via jsonlite::toJSON())

• box_read_excel - Reads remote Microsoft Excel files as data.frame()s (via readxl::read_excel())

box_read(file_id, type = NULL, version_id = NULL, version_no = NULL,
  read_fun = rio::import, fread = FALSE, ...)

box_read_csv(file_id, ...)

box_read_tsv(file_id, ...)

box_read_json(file_id, ...)

box_read_excel(file_id, ...)

Arguments

file_id	The box.com id for the file that you'd like to download
type	MIME type (aka internet media type) used to override the content type returned by the server. See Wikipedia for a list of common types
version_id	If downloading an older version, the version_id of the desired file
version_no	The version of the file you'd like to download (starting at 1)
read_fun	The function used to read the data into R. Defaults to rio()::import()
fread	Should the function data.table::fread be used to read .csv files? Passed to rio()::import() (if used).
...	Passed to as additional parameters to read_fun

See also

• box_dl() for saving files to disk

• box_save() for working with R workspaces

• box_source() for working with R code.