Load the health data

Description

The ‘d4h_load()’ function loads files into the R environment. It supports various file formats, including ‘csv’, ‘rds’, ‘xls’, ‘xlsx’, ‘json’, ‘dbc’ and ‘dbf’. Multiple files can be passed as long as there is column name consistency across multiple files.

d4h_load(input_file, sheet = NULL, header = NULL)

Arguments

input_file: Complete path to the input file.
sheet: The name(s) of the ‘xlsx’/ ‘xls’ sheet(s) to be loaded. Optional.
header: The user can indicate whether the file has a header or not. If not, a header will be introduced with generic column names (column_1, column_2, etc). If this parameter is not passed the function will try to detect automatically. Optional.

Returns

A data.frame with the loaded data.

Examples

# load single files of different formats
# json
json_path <- d4h_example("example_dataset.json")
head(d4h_load(json_path))

# csv
csv_path <- d4h_example("example_dataset.csv")
head(d4h_load(csv_path))

# load multiple files with the same columns
rds2023_path <- d4h_example("example_dataset_2023.rds")
rds2024_path <- d4h_example("example_dataset_2024.rds")
head(d4h_load(rds2023_path))
head(d4h_load(rds2024_path))

# you can see that the two datasets have the same columns
# thus they can be loaded together
rds <- d4h_load(c(rds2023_path, rds2024_path))
head(rds)
nrow(rds) # the number of rows is the sum of the two datasets

# load an 'xlsx' file and specify the sheet to be loaded
xlsx_path <- d4h_example("example_dataset.xlsx")
d4h_load(xlsx_path)
# the function will automatically detect if there are multiple sheets and
# load the first one, if you want a different one you can specify it with
# the sheet argument
head(d4h_load(xlsx_path, sheet = "year2024"))