Dear Steve,

Another option would be using list() to storage your files into R:

# Year/Month
year <- 1986:1995
month <- sprintf("%02d", 1:12)

# Names
Files <- paste(year,month,'.asc',sep="")

# Data
ListFiles <- sapply(Files, read.table, header=TRUE,sep="")

# To access the fist file
ListFiles[[1]]  #for the first

HTH,

Jorge


On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Steve Murray <smurray444@hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> 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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