Creating a data frame with the contents of multiple txt files

Question

I'm new to R programming and am having difficulties trying to create one data frame from a number of text files. I have a directory containing over 100 text files. Each of the files have a different file name but the contents are of a similar format e.g. 3 columns (name, age,gender). I want to load each of the text files into R and merge them into 1 data frame.

So far I have:

txt_files = list.files(path='names/', pattern="*.txt");
do.call("rbind", lapply(txt_files, as.data.frame))

This has created a list of the file names but not the contents of the files. I'm able to read in the content of one file and create a data frame but I can't seem to do it for multiple files at once. If anyone could offer any help I'd really appreciate it as I'm completely stuck!

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I think you might want something like this:

# Put in your actual path where the text files are saved
mypath = "C:/Users/Dave/Desktop"
setwd(mypath)

# Create list of text files
txt_files_ls = list.files(path=mypath, pattern="*.txt") 
# Read the files in, assuming comma separator
txt_files_df <- lapply(txt_files_ls, function(x) {read.table(file = x, header = T, sep =",")})
# Combine them
combined_df <- do.call("rbind", lapply(txt_files_df, as.data.frame)) 

At least that worked for me when I created a couple of sample text files. Hope that helps.