[R] extracting file names

David Wolfskill r at catwhisker.org
Thu Mar 24 04:49:48 CET 2011


On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 03:49:32PM +1300, Darcy Webber wrote:
> Dear R users,
> 
> I am trying to figure out a way to extract the original file name of a
> .DAT (e.g., IC48.DAT) file imported into R using the file.choose()
> function, i.e.,
> 
> dat <- read.table(file.choose(), header = FALSE)
> 
> The reason I would like to do this is to use that file name to name an
> output file, thus if I had the file name, e.g.,
> 
> file.name <- IC48
> # then I do a bunch of stuff to dat
> 
> Then I want to save it as:
> 
> write.table(dat, file = paste(file.name"_output.DAT"))
> 
> Does anyone know any way I could do this. Thanks in advance.

Per ?file.choose, output of file.choose() is "A character vector
of length one giving the file path," so why not do that separately
from the read.table(), such as:

file.name <- file.choose()
dat <- read.table(file.name, header = FALSE)
...
write.table(dat, file = paste(file.name, "_output.DAT", sep = ""))

[Caveat: I haven't actually tried the above.]

> ...

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				r at catwhisker.org
Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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