How do you read multiple .txt files into R?

r lapply fread read.table readr
Eric Brotto picture Eric Brotto · Aug 3, 2010 · Viewed 53.7k times · Source

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

Greg picture Greg · Aug 3, 2010

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)

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