Serialization Interface for Single Objects

Description

Functions to write a single R object to a file, and to restore it.

Usage

saveRDS(object, file = "", ascii = FALSE, version = NULL,
        compress = TRUE, refhook = NULL)

readRDS(file, refhook = NULL)

Arguments

Details

These functions provide the means to save a single R object to a connection (typically a file) and to restore the object, quite possibly under a different name. This differs from save and load, which save and restore one or more named objects into an environment. They are widely used by R itself, for example to store metadata for a package and to store the help.search databases: the ".rds" file extension is most often used.

Functions serialize and unserialize provide a slightly lower-level interface to serialization: objects serialized to a connection by serialize can be read back by readRDS and conversely.

All of these interfaces use the same serialization format, which has been used since R 1.4.0 (but extended from time to time as new object types have been added to R). However, save writes a single line header (typically "RDXs\n") before the serialization of a single object (a pairlist of all the objects to be saved).

Compression is handled by the connection opened when file is a file name, so is only possible when file is a connection if handled by the connection. So e.g. url connections will need to be wrapped in a call to gzcon.

If a connection is supplied it will be opened (in binary mode) for the duration of the function if not already open: if it is already open it must be in binary mode for saveRDS(ascii = FALSE) or to read non-ASCII saves.

Value

For readRDS, an R object.

For saveRDS, NULL invisibly.

See Also

serialize, save and load.

The ‘R Internals’ manual for details of the format used.

Examples

fil <- tempfile("women", fileext = ".rds")
## save a single object to file
saveRDS(women, fil)
## restore it under a different name
women2 <- readRDS(fil)
identical(women, women2)
## or examine the object via a connection, which will be opened as needed.
con <- gzfile(fil)
readRDS(con)
close(con)

## Less convenient ways to restore the object
## which demonstrate compatibility with unserialize()
con <- gzfile(fil, "rb")
identical(unserialize(con), women)
close(con)
con <- gzfile(fil, "rb")
wm <- readBin(con, "raw", n = 1e4) # size is a guess
close(con)
identical(unserialize(wm), women)

## Format compatibility with serialize():
fil2 <- tempfile("women")
con <- file(fil2, "w")
serialize(women, con) # ASCII, uncompressed
close(con)
identical(women, readRDS(fil2))
fil3 <- tempfile("women")
con <- bzfile(fil3, "w")
serialize(women, con) # binary, bzip2-compressed
close(con)
identical(women, readRDS(fil3))

unlink(c(fil, fil2, fil3))