Feather provides binary columnar serialization for data frames. It is designed to make reading and writing data frames efficient, and to make sharing data across data analysis languages easy. read_feather() can read both the Feather Version 1 (V1), a legacy version available starting in 2016, and the Version 2 (V2), which is the Apache Arrow IPC file format. read_ipc_file() is an alias of read_feather().

read_feather(file, col_select = NULL, as_data_frame = TRUE, mmap = TRUE)

read_ipc_file(file, col_select = NULL, as_data_frame = TRUE, mmap = TRUE)

Arguments

file

A character file name or URI, raw vector, an Arrow input stream, or a FileSystem with path (SubTreeFileSystem). If a file name or URI, an Arrow InputStream will be opened and closed when finished. If an input stream is provided, it will be left open.

col_select

A character vector of column names to keep, as in the "select" argument to data.table::fread(), or a tidy selection specification of columns, as used in dplyr::select().

as_data_frame

Should the function return a data.frame (default) or an Arrow Table?

mmap

Logical: whether to memory-map the file (default TRUE)

Value

A data.frame if as_data_frame is TRUE (the default), or an Arrow Table otherwise

See also

FeatherReader and RecordBatchReader for lower-level access to reading Arrow IPC data.

Examples

# We recommend the ".arrow" extension for Arrow IPC files (Feather V2).
tf <- tempfile(fileext = ".arrow")
on.exit(unlink(tf))
write_feather(mtcars, tf)
df <- read_feather(tf)
dim(df)
#> [1] 32 11
# Can select columns
df <- read_feather(tf, col_select = starts_with("d"))