Does R have a way of preserving column format when exporting a data frame?

Question

I often export data.frame's in R but run into the problem when I try to import them back in, lose all of the formatting into date/numeric/logical/factor values and get it all back as character variables instead. It gets kind of old to have to run a cleaning/formatting script over and over again on the same file so I was wondering if there is a way or a parameter on write.table that allows one to conserve all of this?

Answer 1

Use saveRDS and readRDS. These will save and load your data frames into exactly the same format.