How do you read in multiple .txt files into R?

Question

I'm using R to visualize some data all of which is in .txt format. There are a few hundred files in a directory and I want to load it all into one table, in one shot.

Any help?

EDIT:

Listing the files is not a problem. But I am having trouble going from list to content. I've tried some of the code from here, but I get a bug with this part:

all.the.data <- lapply( all.the.files,  txt  , header=TRUE)

saying

 Error in match.fun(FUN) : object 'txt' not found

Any snippets of code that would clarify this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Look at the help for functions dir() aka list.files(). This allows you get a list of files, possibly filtered by regular expressions, over which you could loop.

If you want to them all at once, you first have to have content in one file. One option would be to use cat to type all files to stdout and read that using popen(). See help(Connections) for more.

Answer 2

You can try this:

filelist = list.files(pattern = ".*.txt")

#assuming tab separated values with a header    
datalist = lapply(filelist, function(x)read.table(x, header=T)) 

#assuming the same header/columns for all files
datafr = do.call("rbind", datalist) 

Answer 3

Thanks for all the answers!

In the meanwhile, I also hacked a method on my own. Let me know if it is any useful:

library(foreign)

setwd("/path/to/directory")

files <-list.files()

data <- 0


for (f in files) {

tempData = scan( f, what="character")

data <- c(data,tempData)    

}