Python and RST Usage

To use the .rds file in Python, go to the file that you’d like to use. GitHub is unable to render these files, but you can right-click on the raw file and copy the link for it. Then, use the read_r() function from the pyreadr library to read the dataset in. That might look something like this. Here, I’ll read in the RDS for the 2010 play-by-play data into an object called pbp2010.

You may also need to get the pyreadr library, if you don’t already have it in your Python installation. You can get it using:

::

pip install pyreadr

import pyreadr
url = "https://github.com/kim3-sudo/march_madness_data/blob/main/PlayByPlay_2010/Events_2010.rds?raw=true"
scratch = "./pbp2010.rda"
local = pyreadr.download_file(url, scratch)
result = pyreadr.read_r(local)
df = result[None]

If you are reading the file straight off of the repository, you need to first download it into a temporary or scratch location using the download_file() function from the pyreadr library. You can then load in the file directly from your scratch location. read_r() does not support Internet URLs.

When you use the read_r() function, it loads the contents of the RDS into a dictionary where keys are the names of objects and the values are Python objects. Since RDS files only have one object, use None as the key.