CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rorganization
lebelinoz
lebelinoz

Reputation: 5068

Read the first line of every R script in my project

I'm trying to organise a growing R project which my team has been collaborating on. My initial thought is to put all the script names into a list

 x = list.files(recursive = TRUE)

and put it in a spreadsheet so I can go through, thinking about which scripts are obsolete, and which ones probably should form separate projects.

Thankfully, most scripts have a one-line comment at the top which summarises the scripts contents.

Is there an R way to put all those first-row comments in a dataframe? i.e. is there a function in R for extracting lines of code from a filename?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 370

Answers (2)

R. Schifini
R. Schifini

Reputation: 9313

Try the following:

myRFiles = list.files(pattern = "*.R")
firstLines = lapply(myRFiles, FUN =  read.table, nrows = 1, sep = "\n")
df = do.call(rbind, firstLines)

myRFiles contain all your R files (change the pattern for your case).

With read.table you can read the first row (nrows=1) and use the newline character (\n) as separator, thus only reading one column per file.

Finally join all together into one data frame with do.call and rbind

Upvotes: 0

Rich Scriven
Rich Scriven

Reputation: 99371

You can read the first line of a file via readLines(n = 1). To read all the first lines, use an apply loop. Then you can just put the result into a data frame.

data.frame(comment = sapply(x, readLines, n = 1))

where x is the character vector of file names.

Upvotes: 2

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