[R] Reading in files with variable parts to names

[Rowe, Brian Lee Yung (Portfolio Analytics)]

Try this to generate your year/month combinations:

> expand.grid(year=1986:1995, month=1:12)

Obviously you'll have to format the months.


-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org]
On Behalf Of Steve Murray
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 2:40 PM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] Reading in files with variable parts to names



Dear all,

I'm trying to read in a whole directory of files which have two variable
parts to the file name: year and month. E.g. comp198604.asc represents
April of 1986 - 'comp' is fixed in each case. Years range between 1986
to 1995 and months are between 1 and 12.

Just to be clear, there are 12 files associated with each year: e.g.
comp198601, comp198602, ... comp198612  through to comp199501,
comp199502 ... comp199512.

I am trying to automate the reading in of these files, but am struggling
to find an adequate way of achieving this. The closest I've got is by
doing:



year <- 1986:1995
month <- sprintf("%02d", 1:12)  # formats numbers to 2 digits (for
maintaining leading zeros in file names)

filelist <- paste("C:\\Documents and
Settings\\Data\\comp",year,month,".asc", sep="")

filelist

 [1] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198601.asc"
 [2] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198702.asc"
 [3] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198803.asc"
 [4] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198904.asc"
 [5] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199005.asc"
 [6] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199106.asc"
 [7] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199207.asc"
 [8] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199308.asc"
 [9] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199409.asc"
[10] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp199510.asc"
[11] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198611.asc"
[12] "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Data\\comp198712.asc"


I need 1986 to remain fixed whilst it cycles through 01 to 12, before it
moves onto 1987 and cycles again. There should be 120 outputs in total
(10 years each with 12 months), but at present it's only reaching 12
outputs.

I'd be grateful to learn what I'm doing wrong here so that I can solve
this.

Many thanks as ever,

Steve


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