Using IDX files with R

Introduction

This package provides functions to convert files to and from IDX format to arrays in R. IDX is a format to store vector and arrays in binary format.

Reading IDX format is needed for instance to use the MNIST database of handwritten digits provided by Yann LeCun.

Usage

This basic example downloads, uncompresses and reads the IDX file from the train set of the MNIST data.

library(idx2r)
library(R.utils)
URL = "http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/"
file_name = "train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz"
download.file(paste0(URL, file_name), "train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz")
gunzip(file_name)
train = read_idx(gsub(pattern = "\\.gz", "", file_name))
dim(train)
#> [1] 60000    28    28

Installation

The package can be installed from GitHub with the following command:

if(!require(devtools)) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("edoffagne/idx2r")

The package can also be installed from a CRAN repository:

install.packages("idx2r")