filesstrings

Convenient functions for moving files, deleting directories, and a variety of string operations that facilitate manipulating file names and extracting information from strings.

Installation

To install the release version (recommended) from CRAN, in R, enter

install.packages("filesstrings")

To install the development version, in R, first install devtools via install.packages("devtools"). Then enter

devtools::install_github("rorynolan/filesstrings")

Use

First let’s load the library:

library(filesstrings)

#> Loading required package: stringr

Files

Move files around

I find it bizarre that base R has no file.move. To move a file, you have to unintuitively rename it. filesstrings provides file.move(files, destinations). This function has the nice feature that if you try to move files to a directory that doesn’t exist, it creates the directory first and then puts the files inside. Let’s create a directory and a file:

dir.create("tmp_dir")
file.create("tmp.txt")

#> [1] TRUE

Now let’s put the file into the directory:

file.move("tmp.txt", "tmp_dir")

#> 1 file moved. 0 failed.

Delete Directories

To delete directories with base R, one has to use unlink(..., recursive = TRUE). The filesstrings package gives you dir.remove() which does the same job.

dir.remove("tmp_dir")

#> 1 directory deleted. 0 failed to delete.

Remove spaces from file names

“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 TRUE

remove_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 TRUE

Strings

The n^th number in a string

I often want to get the first, last or n^th number in a string.

pop <- "A population of 1000 comprised of 488 dogs and 512 cats."
nth_number(pop, n = 1)

#> [1] 1000

nth_number(pop, n = -1)  # last number

#> [1] 512

All the numbers in a string

extract_numbers(pop)

#> [[1]]
#> [1] 1000  488  512

All the non-numbers in a string

extract_non_numerics(pop)

#> [[1]]
#> [1] "A population of " " comprised of "   " dogs and "      
#> [4] " cats."

Trim anything (not just whitespace)

stringr’s str_trim just trims whitespace. What if you want to trim something else? Now you can trim_anything().

trim_anything("__rmarkdown_", "_")

#> [1] "rmarkdown"

Contribution

Contributions to this package are welcome. The preferred method of contribution is through a github pull request. Feel free to contact me by creating an issue. Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.