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

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 <- list.files(pattern = "dbf")

Can anyone give me some direction?

Try this which uses globs rather than regular expressions so it will only pick out the file names that end in .dbf

filenames <- Sys.glob("*.dbf")

Gives you the list of files with full path:

  Sys.glob(file.path(file_dir, "*.dbf")) ## file_dir = file containing directory

Peg the pattern to find "\\.dbf" at the end of the string using the $ character:

list.files(pattern = "\\.dbf$")

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.