Here are some useful things which filesstrings makes
easier than base or fs.
First let’s load the library:
library(filesstrings)#> Loading required package: stringr“A space in your file name is a hole in your soul.” - Jenny Bryan
remove_filename_spaces(replacement = "_") replaces them
all with underscores for all files in a directory. By default, they are
replaced with nothing.
file.create(c("file 1.txt", "file 2.txt"))#> [1] TRUE TRUEremove_filename_spaces(pattern = "txt$", replacement = "_")#> 2 files required renaming and this was done successfully.list.files(pattern = "txt$")#> [1] "file_1.txt" "file_2.txt"file.remove(list.files(pattern = "txt$")) # clean up#> [1] TRUE TRUEThe microscope I use numbers files with 3 numbers by default,
i.e. file001.tif, file002.tif and so on. This
is a problem when the automatic numbering passes 1000, whereby we have
file999.tif, file1000.tif. What’s the problem
with this? Well, sometimes you need alphabetical order to reflect the
true order of your files. These file numbers don’t satisfy this
requirement:
file.names <- c("file999.tif", "file1000.tif")
sort(file.names)#> [1] "file1000.tif" "file999.tif"so file1000.tif comes before file999.tif in
alphabetical order. The function nice_nums() returns the
names that we’d like them to have:
nice_nums(file.names)#> [1] "file0999.tif" "file1000.tif"The function nice_file_nums applies such renaming to all
the files in an entire directory. It wraps nice_nums.
before_last_dot("spreadsheet_92.csv")#> [1] "spreadsheet_92"Add a file extension if needed:
give_ext("xyz", "csv")#> [1] "xyz.csv"If the file name has the correct extension already, it’s left alone:
give_ext("xyz.csv", "csv") #> [1] "xyz.csv"Change a file extension:
give_ext("abc.csv", "txt") # tack the new extension onto the end#> [1] "abc.csv.txt"give_ext("abc.csv", "txt", replace = TRUE) # replace the current extension#> [1] "abc.txt"