farff

1.1.1

A Faster 'ARFF' File Reader and Writer

2packages depend

13.7Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

12/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Marc BeckerFirst published 2016-09-113 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Reads and writes 'ARFF' files. 'ARFF' (Attribute-Relation File Format) files are like 'CSV' files, with a little bit of added meta information in a header and standardized NA values. They are quite often used for machine learning data sets and were introduced for the 'WEKA' machine learning 'Java' toolbox. See https://waikato.github.io/weka-wiki/formats_and_processing/arff_stable/ for further info on 'ARFF' and for http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/ for more info on 'WEKA'. 'farff' gets rid of the 'Java' dependency that 'RWeka' enforces, and it is at least a faster reader (for bigger files). It uses 'readr' as parser back-end for the data section of the 'ARFF' file. Consistency with 'RWeka' is tested on 'Github' and 'Travis CI' with hundreds of 'ARFF' files from 'OpenML'.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("farff", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("mlr-org/farff")

Development version from mlr-org/farff. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-farff

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-farff

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-farff

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

1NOTE12OK

Failing flavors

NOTE r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc

Slowest check: 1.3 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Code health

None

Tests · ratio 0.00

not tracked

Coverage

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

NOTE2026-08-01
12 OK · 1 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMENoVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 100% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 100%
Documented parameters: 92%
Return-value docs: 100%
References docs: 0%

Downloads

13.7K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #4,313 · ~38/day · ~1.1K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

56330 days

2K90 days

13.7K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on427 r2u

Repository

GitHub ↗ mlr-org/farff

13Stars

6Forks

14Open issues

1Open PRs

0Releases

208Commits

6Contributors

arffrweka

208 commits · Last activity 2021-05-10

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

2 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 2 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/mlr-org/farff on 2026-07-30.

Continuous integration (1)

Travis CI

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

6 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (0)

none

Imports (4)

BBmisc checkmate readr stringi

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (2)

OpenML testthat

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

2direct

0indirect

OpenML rtemis

Code & Tests

People & History

People (3)

Maintainer (1)

Marc Becker

Maintainer, Author · added in 1.1.1

Authors (3)

Marc Becker

Maintainer, Author · added in 1.1.1

Bernd Bischl

Author

Jakob Bossek

Author

Package Timeline

3 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.1.1Latest
2021-05-11 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
1.1
2019-05-03 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
1.0
2016-09-11
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03

Package metadata

First published: 2016-09-11
Total releases: 3 / 10 yrs
License: BSD_2_clause + file LICENSE OSI
Download size: 16 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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