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

Answer 1

I'm not sure of the complexity of how you want to list all the files (i.e. do you want the output in a list type, or a vector of file names?) or how you will import each file, but the simplest method would be to use the `pattern` input within `list.files()` to obtain a vector of file names and then subsetting the vector to contain only the .dbf extension.

To demonstrate what I'm thinking of, see below:

```

dbfs <- list.files('C:\\Scratch', pattern = '\\.dbf')

dbf_only <- subset(dbfs, substr(dbfs, nchar(dbfs) - 3, nchar(dbfs)) == '.dbf')

dbf_only # Should be a vector of .dbf file names only.

# Alternate approach with the tidyverse:

library(tidyverse)

list.files('C:\\Scratch', pattern = '\\.dbf') %>%

subset(., substr(., nchar(.) - 3, nchar(.)) == '.dbf')

```

Hopefully, this answers your question!