R Reading in a zip data file without unzipping it

Solution 1:

If your zip file is called Sales.zip and contains only a file called Sales.dat, I think you can simply do the following (assuming the file is in your working directory):

data <- read.table(unz("Sales.zip", "Sales.dat"), nrows=10, header=T, quote="\"", sep=",")

Solution 2:

No need to use unz, as now read.table can handle the zipped file directly:

data <- read.table("Sales.zip", nrows=10, header=T, quote="\"", sep=",")

See this post

Solution 3:

The methods of the readr package also support compressed files if the file suffix indicates the nature of the file, that is files ending in .gz, .bz2, .xz, or .zip will be automatically uncompressed.

require(readr)
myData <- read_csv("foo.txt.gz")

Solution 4:

This should work just fine if the file is sales.csv.

data <- readr::read_csv(unzip("Sales.zip", "Sales.csv"))

To check the filename without extracting the file. This works

unzip("sales.zip", list = TRUE)

Solution 5:

If you have zcat installed on your system (which is the case for linux, macos, and cygwin) you could also use:

zipfile<-"test.zip"
myData <- read.delim(pipe(paste("zcat", zipfile)))

This solution also has the advantage that no temporary files are created.