Using R to list all files with a specified extension

Question

I m very new to R and am working on updating an R script to iterate through a series of  dbf tables created using ArcGIS and produce a series of graphs   I have a directory  C  Scratch  that will contain all of my  dbf files  However  when ArcGIS creates these tables  it also includes a  dbf xml file  I want to remove these  dbf xml files from my file list and thus my iteration  I ve tried searching and experimenting with regular expressions to no avail  This is the basic expression I m using  Excluding all of the various experimentation    files  lt - list files pattern    dbf     Can anyone give me some direction

User · Answer

I am not very good in using sophisticated regular expressions, so I'd do such task in the following way:

files <- list.files()
dbf.files <- files[-grep(".xml", files, fixed=T)]

First line just lists all files from working dir. Second one drops everything containing ".xml" (grep returns indices of such strings in 'files' vector; subsetting with negative indices removes corresponding entries from vector). "fixed" argument for grep function is just my whim, as I usually want it to peform crude pattern matching without Perl-style fancy regexprs, which may cause surprise for me.

I'm aware that such solution simply reflects drawbacks in my education, but for a novice it may be useful =) at least it's easy.

User · Answer

Gives you the list of files with full path       Sys glob file path file dir     dbf       file dir   file containing directory

User · Answer

files  lt - list files pattern       dbf        at the end means that this is end of string   dbf   will work too  but adding        is special character in regular expressions so you need to escape it  ensure that you match only files with extension  dbf  in case you have e g   adbf files

User · Answer

Peg the pattern to find     dbf  at the end of the string using the   character   list files pattern       dbf

User · Answer

Try this which uses globs rather than regular expressions so it will only pick out the file names that end in  dbf  filenames  lt - Sys glob    dbf

[r] Using R to list all files with a specified extension

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