readr

readr is an R package that provides fast, user-friendly functions for reading rectangular data from delimited files like CSV and TSV. It’s designed to parse diverse real-world data formats while providing clear diagnostic messages when parsing encounters unexpected results.

The package automatically guesses column types during exploratory work but encourages explicit type specifications for production code. It’s significantly faster than base R (up to 10-100x), handles strings and dates more sensibly by default, and follows tidyverse conventions for consistency across workflows. Since version 2.0.0, it uses the vroom parsing engine for improved performance.