12

A very simple R script adds a ascending row index to a textfile "0.txt" and also adds a header "time" to it. After that the data is written to a file "0-edit.txt"

data<-read.table("0.txt", header=TRUE,sep=",",row.names= NULL);
colnames(data)[1] = "time"
write.table(data,quote=FALSE,sep=", ","0-edit.txt");

Assume i have 4 files called 0.txt, 1.txt, 2.txt, ...in the same folder, how can I use a counter (or something else) to iterate over those file names in my script?

4 Answers 4

15
for(i in 0:3) {
  infile <- paste(i,".txt",sep="")
  outfile <- paste(i,"-edit.txt",sep="")

  data <- read.table(infile,header=TRUE,sep=",",row.names=NULL)
  colnames(data)[1] = "time"
  write.table(data,quote=FALSE,sep=", ",outfile)
}
Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Thank you very much, the paste function escaped me somehow
@Martin: You're welcome. You may also find ?file.path handy.
15

Here is a solution without a loop using lapply:

infiles <- dir(pattern='\\.txt$')

change.files <- function(file){
  data <- read.table(file, header=TRUE, sep=",", row.names=NULL)
  colnames(data)[1] = "time"
  write.table(data, quote=FALSE, sep=", ", sub("\\.txt$","-edit.txt", file))
}

lapply(infiles , change.files)

For me the real advantage of this approach is that you can easily run it in parallel using mclapply (from multicore package) instead of lapply. Or parLapply from snow. Also to me it looks nicer.

1 Comment

This just came in handy for another task and I have to agree, it is elegant
7

Try this:

files <- list.files(path="", pattern=".txt", all.files=T, full.names=T)
for (file in files) {
## do stuff
}

You can use regular expressions for the pattern matching, so if you have lots of text files but only want the ones with numeric names, use "[0-9].txt" or "[0-3].txt".

Comments

3

More generally, you can use dir() to get the files in a given directory, and use select to limit it to .txt files.

file.dir <- "/path/to/files"
for(infile in dir(file.dir, pattern="\\.txt$")) {
  outfile <- gsub("\\.txt$","-edit\\.txt", infile)

  data <- read.table(infile,header=TRUE,sep=",",row.names=NULL)
  colnames(data)[1] = "time"
  write.table(data,quote=FALSE,sep=", ",outfile)
}

Comments

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.