There are two common ways to save R output to a text file:

Method 1: Use the sink() Function

#define file name
sink("my_data.txt")

#write this string to file
"here is some text"

#close the external connection
sink() 

Method 2: Use the cat() Function

#write string to file
cat("here is some text", file = "my_data.txt")

The following examples show how to use each method in practice.

Example 1: Save R Output to Text File Using sink()

We can use the following sink() function to export a character string to a text file:

#define file name
sink("my_data.txt")

#write this string to file
"here is some text"

#close the external connection
sink()

We can then navigate to the and open the text file:

The file contains the string that we specified.

We can also use the cat() function to export something more complex like a data frame to a text file:

#define file name
sink("my_data.txt")

#define data frame to write to file
df <- data.frame(player=c('A', 'B', 'C', 'D','E'),
                 points=c(12, 29, 24, 30, 19),
                 assists=c(5, 5, 7, 4, 10))

print(df)

#close the external connection
sink()

We can then navigate to the current working directory and open the text file:

The file contains the data frame that we created.

Example 2: Save R Output to Text File Using cat()

We can use the following cat() function to save a string to a text file:

#save string to text file
cat("here is some text", file = "my_data.txt")

We can then navigate to the current working directory and open the text file:

The text file contains the string that we specified.

Notice that the cat() function doesn’t include any line numbers from the R console in the text file, unlike the sink() function.

Feel free to use whichever function suits your needs.