Reading Pickle File in R

Recently, I was asked if I could share a particular dataset with some colleague of mine who wanted to test it in an R environment. Although this sounds straightforward, the problem was that the dataset from Pandas dataframe was stored in .pickle format. Now, at this stage, one possible solution was to load it in Python, save it as a CSV file and load the CSV file in an R environment. However, I came up with a possibility to achieve this without involving any CSV files.

Let us assume you have a file called dataset.pickle in a folder called tsa

[Reticulate] (https://github.com/rstudio/reticulate) is an R package to help interface R with Python. Install this package with the command:

install.packages('reticulate')

Now, create a Python file with the following lines:

import pandas as pd

def read_pickle_file(file):
    pickle_data = pd.read_pickle(file)
    return pickle_data

Create an R file with the following lines:

require("reticulate")

source_python("pickle_reader.py")
pickle_data <- read_pickle_file("C:/tsa/dataset.pickle")

You must now be able to read the data from the pickle file in your R environment.