13  Common Errors

Let’s talk about the most frequent erors in R.

See what I mean? It starts with just typos, but you’ll get past that. Then you’ll mostly be focused on the punctuation. After a while, your punctuation concerns will focus on the lowly parenthesis, or the innocent comma; remember, you wrote this stuff, you brought these commas and such into existence, so be nice.

13.0.1 The Most Common Error

Error: unexpected '|' in "|>"

Or a related syntax error involving the pipe. That’s our pipe operator (|>), which chains lines of code together into a methodology.

As of R 4.1, |> is built into base R — no package needed. If you see this error, make sure you are running R 4.1 or newer: check with R.version in the console.

If you’re seeing an error about %>% from older code or tutorials, that’s the magrittr pipe, which requires loading the tidyverse:

library(tidyverse)

13.0.2 Loading data , path errors

When you download a data set, how do you ‘tell’ R where to find it?

There are many ways, but the easiest by far is to create a folder on your computer, and copy all of the data you’re going to use on a project there. Then in R Studio, create a new Project, and specify the folder you just made as its location. You can create a new project for every unique thing you use R for.

videos. Remind them they need to read my code and change it to fit their data and their computers path