friendlyloader

The goal of friendlyloader is to help with routine running of scripts where you expect to find a file in a certain location, but where the name of the file can be subject to minor changes, such as a change in date or using "_" or "-" instead of spaces.

Installation

You can install the development version of friendlyloader like so:

remotes::install_github("RosalynLP/friendlyloader")

How to use

This package includes wrapper functions for utils::readcsv, readxl::read_excel and openxlsx::read.xlsx. Namely:

1. friendlyloader::read_csv_with_options
2. friendlyloader::read_excel_with_options
3. friendlyloader::read_xlsx_with_options

You supply the usual arguments to these functions, with the optional additional choices:

• useRstudio (default TRUE). A boolean indicating whether to pick an alternative file using interactive R Studio windows, or (when set to FALSE) whether to use the terminal.

• recursive (default TRUE). A boolean. Only impactful when useRstudio == FALSE. Whether to look for files recursively or only in the chosen directory.

Creating a friendly loader for a different file type

If you want to load a file other than csv or Excel you can easily create your own loader using create_loader_with_options(). This takes in a function for loading your desired filetype and outputs a friendly version of that function. For example, for loading RDS files using readRDS():

read_rds_with_options <- create_loader_with_options(readRDS)

read_rds_with_options("some_arbitrary_file.rds")

Matching filenames with dates stripped out

Sometimes you want to load a file in a given location but the date of the file is subject to change. match_base_filename allows you to load the file without triggering an interactive set of options, which can be useful if you are running a server job or Rmarkdown:

# This will read fruits_colours.xlsx 
openxlsx::read.xlsx(match_base_filename("20220328_fruits_colours.xlsx"))

Note that there can be only one file called *fruits*colours*xlsx in the given directory or else the call to this function is ambiguous and it will fail.

Creating input/output functions that write/read from a designated folder

Sometimes it is useful to keep a data folder separate from your working directory, but in this case reading and writing to this folder can be cumbersome.

You can use the create_location_io() function to create a version of a given input/output function which is linked to a given location that is not your working directory. For example

# Create tmp directory
system("mkdir tmp")
# Make function
create_location_io(readr::read_csv, "tmp", prefix="custom")

This generates a function called custom_read_csv() which acts just like readr::read_csv() but reads from the tmp directory instead of the working directory.

The name of the generated function is composed of the prefix plus _ plus the name of the function to be wrapped, not including the package - i.e. just read_csv rather than readr::read_csv.

If the function you are wrapping contains "read", "write" or "save" in the name, you don't have to specify whether it's an input or an output function. If not, you can specify using the io argument.

Using the terminal selector - when useRstudio = FALSE

Loading a csv

This is based on the function utils::read.csv

library(friendlyloader)

# Creating test data frame and writing to csv
df <- data.frame (Fruit = c("Apple", "Orange", "Pear"), Colour = c("Red", "Orange", "Green"))
write.csv(df, "fruits_colours.csv", row.names = FALSE)

# Trying to load csv but with slightly wrong filename
read_csv_with_options("20220328_fruits_colours.csv", useRstudio = FALSE)

#>Could not find file 20220328_fruits_colours.csv. Searching for possible alternatives.
#>Should I use one of the files below?
#># A tibble: 1 × 2
#>  Filename           Subdirectory
#>  <chr>              <chr>       
#>1 fruits_colours.csv .           
#>Type the number to use, or type 'No' and press Enter.     1
#>   Fruit Colour
#>1  Apple    Red
#>2 Orange Orange
#>3   Pear  Green
#>

Loading the first sheet of an Excel file

There are two options which work in the same way. One is based on the function readxl::read_excel, and the other is based on openxlsx::read.xlsx. The names of these functions are read_excel_with_options and read_xlsx_with_options, respectively.

library(friendlyloader)

# Creating test data frame and writing to csv
df <- data.frame (Fruit = c("Apple", "Orange", "Pear"), Colour = c("Red", "Orange", "Green"))
writexl::write_xlsx(df, "fruits_colours.xlsx")

# Trying to load csv but with slightly wrong filename
read_excel_with_options("fruits-colours.xlsx", useRstudio = FALSE)

#>Could not find file fruits-colours.csv. Searching for possible alternatives.
#>Should I use one of the files below?
#># A tibble: 2 × 2
#>  Filename            Subdirectory
#>  <chr>               <chr>       
#>1 fruits_colours.csv  .           
#>2 fruits_colours.xlsx .           
#>Type the number to use, or type 'No' and press Enter.     2
#># A tibble: 3 × 2                                                                                                
#>  Fruit  Colour
#>  <chr>  <chr> 
#>1 Apple  Red   
#>2 Orange Orange
#>3 Pear   Green 
#>

Loading all sheets of an Excel file

Same as above but use read_all_excel_sheets() rather than read_excel_with_options(). This uses the openxlsx package to read the information.