Reading files easily

Reading and writing files can sometimes be challenging. This is an attempt to share the process I am following for making it easy to reading and writing of files in R.

Reading required packages.

library(pacman)
pacman::p_load(fs, folderfun, tidyverse)

Define the path wherein the input and output will be located in the local drive.

I have found the package folder function package and fs package to be very useful for file managing files.

fs::path() will be used to construct the path of the location folder
folderfun::setff() will be used to define a new function, wherein the first argument is the name of the new function prceded by ff.

# Defining the input function
folderfun::setff(name = 'In',
                 fs::path("C:/Users/aqureshi037/PycharmProjects/Ahsan_Blog_Quarto",
                          "posts", "file_n_folder_Mgmt", "input_data")
                 )

Created folder function ffIn(): C:/Users/aqureshi037/PycharmProjects/Ahsan_Blog_Quarto/posts/file_n_folder_Mgmt/input_data

# Defining the ourput function
folderfun::setff(name = 'Out',
                 fs::path("C:/Users/aqureshi037/PycharmProjects/Ahsan_Blog_Quarto",
                          "posts", "file_n_folder_Mgmt", "output_data")
                 )

Created folder function ffOut(): C:/Users/aqureshi037/PycharmProjects/Ahsan_Blog_Quarto/posts/file_n_folder_Mgmt/output_data

Reading of the file

iris.csv file is already located in the ‘input’ folder.

data(iris)

#Writing the data to the folder
readr::write_csv(iris, ffOut("iris.csv"))


#Reading the data from the folder
iris_data <- readr::read_csv(ffIn("iris.csv"))

Rows: 150 Columns: 5
── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Delimiter: ","
chr (1): Species
dbl (4): Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, Petal.Length, Petal.Width

ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.