CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rread.table
stevenjoe
stevenjoe

Reputation: 339

Open Excel File in R With Only Partially Known File Name

I would like to open an Excel file in directory "dld" that starts with "RPT". I've tried the below, but I keep getting an error:

Error in file(file, "rt") : invalid 'description' argument

I'm guessing it has something to do with the code coming from a read.csv and I'm trying to adapt it to read.table.

dld <- "C:/Users/Me/Downloads/"
filename <- paste(dld, "RPT_", sep = "")
file <- read.table(dir(dirname(filename), full.names=T, pattern=paste("^", basename(filename), sep="")))

Ideas? Any direction/help would be greatly appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1030

Answers (1)

MichaelChirico
MichaelChirico

Reputation: 34753

First, as @joran mentioned, there are several tools for reading .xlsx or xls files directly (all of which are covered here).

As to your question of finding a partially matched file name, I would use grepl as follows:

#get all file names in the directory
flz <- list.files("C:/Users/Me/Downloads/")
#find those that start with RPT (or otherwise match your pattern)
my_excel <- flz[grepl("^RPT", flz)]
#(make sure here that you've identified a unique file)

Finally, read the file:

library(readxl)
read_excel(my_excel) #(specifying whichever options as needed)

Upvotes: 1

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