Creating zip file from folders in R

Question

Try to create a zip file from one folder using R.

It mentioned \"Rcompression\" package here: Creating zip file from folders

But I didn\'t find where I can downl

Answer 1

You can create a zip file with the function zip from utils package quite easily. Say you have a directory testDir and you wish to zip a file (or multiple files) inside the directory,

dir('testDir')
# [1] "cats.csv" "test.csv" "txt.txt" 
zip(zipfile = 'testZip', files = 'testDir/test.csv')
# adding: testDir/test.csv (deflated 68%)

The zipped file is saved in the current working directory, unless a different path is specified in the zipfile argument. We can see its size relative to the original unzipped file with

file.info(c('testZip.zip', 'testDir/test.csv'))['size']
#                  size
# testZip.zip       805
# testDir/test.csv 1493

You can zip the whole directory of files (if no sub-folders) with

files2zip <- dir('testDir', full.names = TRUE)
zip(zipfile = 'testZip', files = files2zip)
# updating: testDir/test.csv (deflated 68%)
# updating: testDir/cats.csv (deflated 27%)
# updating: testDir/txt.txt (stored 0%)

And unzip it to view the files,

unzip('testZip.zip', list = TRUE)
#               Name Length                Date
# 1 testDir/test.csv   1493 2014-05-14 20:54:00
# 2 testDir/cats.csv    116 2014-05-14 20:54:00
# 3  testDir/txt.txt     32 2014-05-08 09:37:00

Note: From ?zip, regarding the zip argument.

On Windows, the default relies on a zip program (for example that from Rtools) being in the path.