CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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jennyro
jennyro

Reputation: 77

How to read an Excel file from a folder without specifying the filename?

Is there a way to read an Excel file into R directly from a folder without having to specify the filename? I'm using the readxl library and I have only 1 file in the folder, but the file's name changes monthly.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1989

Answers (3)

Konrad Rudolph
Konrad Rudolph

Reputation: 545923

As noted in other answers, this can be solved using the dir function.

Assuming the variable path contains the path of the directory in which the XLSX file is located, then the following will give you the full path to the file:

file_path = dir(path, pattern = '\\.xlsx$', full.names = TRUE)

Note that pattern uses regular expressions rather than glob format! Using the glob pattern *.xlsx might appear to work but it’s incorrect, only works by accident, and will also match other file names.

Upvotes: 1

rifset
rifset

Reputation: 213

Suppose your file is located inside a folder called myFolder located in disk E:\\

library(readxl)

folderPath <- "E://myFolder"
fileName <- grep(".xlsx", dir(folderPath), value = TRUE)
filePath <- paste(folderPath, fileName, sep = "//")
df <- read_xlsx(filePath)

This code will get the name of your xlsx file inside folderPath each time you run it and then you can import it with readxl::read_xlsx. I assume there is only one xlsx file inside the folder.

Upvotes: 0

Thibaud
Thibaud

Reputation: 1095

The computer need to have the path anyway BUT you can get it without giving if you are absolutly sure that this is the only one file in your folder

see https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/base/html/list.files.html to learn more about how to open a directory and getting filename inside.

If this isn't the only file but this is the only excel file you while have to get the extension of each file and do some parsing to take a decision of wich file you want to open

Upvotes: 2

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