[R] Reading in files with variable parts to names

[Steve Murray]

Dear all,

I'm trying to read in a whole directory of files which have two variable parts to the file name: year and month. E.g. comp198604.asc represents April of 1986 - 'comp' is fixed in each case. Years range between 1986 to 1995 and months are between 1 and 12.

Just to be clear, there are 12 files associated with each year: e.g. comp198601, comp198602, ... comp198612  through to comp199501, comp199502 ... comp199512.

I am trying to automate the reading in of these files, but am struggling to find an adequate way of achieving this. The closest I've got is by doing:



year <- 1986:1995
month <- sprintf("%02d", 1:12)  # formats numbers to 2 digits (for maintaining leading zeros in file names)

filelist <- paste("C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp",year,month,".asc", sep="")

filelist

 [1] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198601.asc"
 [2] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198702.asc"
 [3] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198803.asc"
 [4] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198904.asc"
 [5] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199005.asc"
 [6] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199106.asc"
 [7] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199207.asc"
 [8] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199308.asc"
 [9] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199409.asc"
[10] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199510.asc"
[11] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198611.asc"
[12] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198712.asc"


I need 1986 to remain fixed whilst it cycles through 01 to 12, before it moves onto 1987 and cycles again. There should be 120 outputs in total (10 years each with 12 months), but at present it's only reaching 12 outputs.

I'd be grateful to learn what I'm doing wrong here so that I can solve this.

Many thanks as ever,

Steve


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