How to import files from subdirectories and name them with subdirectory name R

Question

I\'d like to import files (of different lengths) recursively from sub-directories and put them into one data.frame, having one column with the subdirectory name and one colu

Answer 1

Here's a workflow with the map functions from purrr within the tidyverse.

I generated a bunch of csv files to work with to mimic your file structure and some simple data. I threw in 2 lines of junk data at the beginning of each file, since you said you were trying to skip the top 2 lines.

library(tidyverse)

setwd("~/_R/SO/nested")

walk(paste0("folder", 1:3), dir.create)

list.files() %>%
    walk(function(folderpath) {
        map(1:4, function(i) {
            df <- tibble(
                x1 = sample(letters[1:3], 10, replace = T),
                x2 = rnorm(10)
            )
            dummy <- tibble(
                x1 = c("junk line 1", "junk line 2"),
                x2 = c(0)
            )
            bind_rows(dummy, df) %>%
                write_csv(sprintf("%s/file%s.out", folderpath, i))
        })
    })

That gets the following file structure:

├── folder1
|  ├── file1.out
|  ├── file2.out
|  ├── file3.out
|  └── file4.out
├── folder2
|  ├── file1.out
|  ├── file2.out
|  ├── file3.out
|  └── file4.out
└── folder3
   ├── file1.out
   ├── file2.out
   ├── file3.out
   └── file4.out

Then I used list.files(recursive = T) to get a list of the paths to these files, use str_extract to pull text for the folder and file name for each, read the csv file skipping the dummy text, and add the folder and file names so they'll be added to the dataframe.

Since I did this with map_dfr, I get a tibble back, where the dataframes from each iteration are all rbinded together.

all_data <- list.files(recursive = T) %>%
    map_dfr(function(path) {
        # any characters from beginning of path until /
        foldername <- str_extract(path, "^.+(?=/)")
        # any characters between / and .out at end
        filename <- str_extract(path, "(?<=/).+(?=\\.out$)")

        # skip = 3 to skip over names and first 2 lines
        # could instead use col_names = c("x1", "x2")
        read_csv(path, skip = 3, col_names = F) %>%
            mutate(folder = foldername, file = filename)
    })

head(all_data)
#> # A tibble: 6 x 4
#>   X1        X2 folder  file 
#>         
#> 1 b      0.858 folder1 file1
#> 2 b      0.544 folder1 file1
#> 3 a     -0.180 folder1 file1
#> 4 b      1.14  folder1 file1
#> 5 b      0.725 folder1 file1
#> 6 c      1.05  folder1 file1

Created on 2018-04-21 by the reprex package (v0.2.0).