rcxl

Read tabular data from xlsx files with a native C parser.

Worksheet XML is scanned in a single pass and decoded directly into R vectors, with no intermediate document model. The miniz and libdeflate decompressors are bundled, so the package has no R dependencies beyond base R.

Installation

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("vlshields/rcxl")

Usage

read_xlsx() returns a plain data.frame, taking the first row as the header:

library(rcxl)

path <- system.file("extdata", "flights.xlsx", package = "rcxl")
df <- read_xlsx(path)
dim(df)
#> [1] 100  10

Column types are guessed from the cells in the read area; dates come back as POSIXct in UTC.

xlsx_sheets() lists sheets, and sheet takes a name or an index:

multi <- system.file("extdata", "multisheet.xlsx", package = "rcxl")
xlsx_sheets(multi)
#> [1] "Alpha" "Beta"  "Gamma"

read_xlsx(multi, sheet = "Beta")
read_xlsx(multi, sheet = 2)

read_xlsx_all() reads every sheet from a single workbook parse and returns a named list of data.frames:

sheets <- read_xlsx_all(multi)
names(sheets)
#> [1] "Alpha" "Beta"  "Gamma"

Reads can be windowed with an A1 range (column-only and row-only forms work too), or with skip / n_max:

read_xlsx(path, range = "B3:D10")
read_xlsx(path, range = "B:C")
read_xlsx(path, skip = 5, n_max = 10)

col_names accepts TRUE, FALSE (auto names, header row becomes data), or a character vector sized to the read area. col_types takes "text", "numeric", "date", "logical", "guess", "skip", or "list", recycled if length 1:

read_xlsx(path, col_names = FALSE)
read_xlsx(path, col_types = "text")                    # everything as character
read_xlsx(path, col_types = c("skip", rep("guess", 9)))  # drop the first column

Other arguments: na blanks matching cells, trim_ws trims surrounding whitespace, and name_repair is one of "unique" (default), "minimal", or "check_unique". See ?read_xlsx for details.

Set the RCXL_THREADS environment variable to override the worker count. Sheets under 4MB are read serially regardless.

License

MIT. Bundled miniz and libdeflate retain their own copyright and license terms; see inst/COPYRIGHTS.