Question

Lets say I have a folder called "Muffins" which has a lot of different recipes for muffins (e.g., banana, blueberry, etc.), each in an independent file. I want to get all filenames within the "Muffins" folder.

My expected output is a data.frame of two columns: Column 1 = muffins (the folder name) and Column 2 = the individual file name.

      Food     Recipe
      Muffins  Banana
      Muffins  Blueberry
      Muffins  Chocolate
      etc.     etc.

I think this can be achieved with a simple for-loop, but I haven't find a way to make it work.

Answer 1

I'm working on linux, so you may need to tweak this answer a little bit if you're in Windows:

As @Elin pointed out in the comments, list.files() is your friend here. Please read the help file for it. We also will use the read.table function in order to split the string returned by list.files into the folder and file columns:

read.table(text = list.files("folder", 
                             include.dirs= FALSE, 
                             full.names=TRUE), 
           sep = "/")

What does the code do: read.table reads a vector and separates columns when it finds the "/". list.files searches "folder", returns full.names, that is, file names that follow the folder name, as in a path, and does not include.dirs.

Get a data frame of file names in a folder with R

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