load_data: Load CourseKata data from a directory, zipped directory, file...

In UCLATALL/CourseKataData: Work With Data From CourseKata Data Science Classes

Load CourseKata data from a directory, zipped directory, file path(s), or memory

Description

This function is useful for loading CourseKata files from various sources. As a general purpose function, it has a few different parameters to work with. The most common usage will likely be selecting specific types of files to load from a CourseKata download. To do this, pass in a path (or a vector of paths) that points to a data download, and additionally use the regexp argument to specify what kind of file you want (e.g. "responses"). The function will then load in all of the "responses.csv" files it files at the locations you specified. You can also directly pass in file names instead of the directory/pattern combination. Finally, you can optionally specify a class_id if you know it.

Usage

load_data(object, regexp = ".*", class_id = NULL, progress_message = NULL)

Arguments

object	The object to process the data from. This can be one of a variety of options: the path(s) to a CourseKata data download zip file or the directory extracted from that zip the path(s) to a specific CSV file (e.g. classes.csv) a data.frame
regexp	If object is a directory or zipped directory, a regex pattern indicating which file names to search for. The default value '.*' matches all files.
class_id	(Optional) A character vector of the IDs of specific classes you want to extract data for. These values should correspond to the names of the directories where the desired CSV files can be found in the original data download.
progress_message	The message to show above the progress bar.

Value

When a file path (or vector of file paths) is given, the files are read in and merged into a single table. Behind the scenes, we use data.table to process the data because it is very fast. You can use data.tables more or less like data.frames.

When a directory or zip file is passed, the regexp argument is required to determine which files you want from that directory. In general, you can keep this simple as the CourseKata data directories are structured simply and consistently. Something like "responses" should reliably find the "responses.csv" files. If you are having troubles (perhaps the instructor included supplementary files called "student_responses_and_comments.csv") you can construct a more specific pattern (see regex). The matched files are read in just as if you had passed their specific paths to the function.

Sometimes it is useful to only extract data related to a specific class. To do this, you can use the class_id argument. If you include the ID of the class you want (you can get this from "classes.csv"), the regexp argument will be modified such that it only matches files from that class. For this reason, it isn't recommended to use the class_id in your regexp and use the class_id argument.

UCLATALL/CourseKataData documentation built on Dec. 4, 2023, 2:25 a.m.