How to access to specify file in subfolder without change working directory In R?

Question

In R, I want to access to some file in subfolder. But I don't want to change working directory then move back. It lost time and long.

For exmaple, I working on /home/phuong folder. Here is the tree structure of phuong.

phuong-> data1, data2, data3. data1-> abc.csv, def.csv, script1.R data2-> bond.csv, option.csv, pricing.R data3->..... 

So i want to load data in abc.csv, def.csv and run code in pricing.R.

So if use code setwd, it make me lost many time and look code so stupid, like this:

setwd("/home/phuong/data1" );  read.csv("abc.csv"); read.csv("def.csv"); setwd("/home/phuong/data2" ); source("pricing.R") 

I lost a lot of times to move from folder to another folder but all of them in the same folder home/phuong/. So I need some way to access to any file in subfolder without setwd command. Please help me , thks.

Answer 1

Assuming your working directory is /home/hermie and you want to load a .csv file from a directory below your current WD (let's say /home/hermie/data), you can simply do this:

setwd('/home/hermie') myData <- read.csv('./data/myCsvFile.csv') 

Of course you could also navigate "upwards" in the directory tree. Let's say you want to load a file in Bob's home directory (/home/bob). You can do it as follows:

setwd('/home/hermie') data_from_bob <- read.csv('../bob/otherDataFile.csv') # Of course, this will work                                                       # only if you can read                                                       # files from that directory 

Hope this helps.

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Update

Somehow I think you want someone to write the solution for you... and I propose this:

> setwd('/home/phuong') > data_abc <- read.csv('./data1/abc.csv') > data_def <- read.csv('./data1/def.csv') > source('./data2/pricing.R') 

Is it really so dificult to write this? You would have to write much more if you changed your WD on every step of the way.

And, about my sugestion on symlinks, on your bash terminal you could do something like this:

$ cd /home/phuong $ ln -s ./data1/abc.csv data1_abc.csv $ ln -s ./data1/def.csv data1_def.csv $ ln -s ./data2/pricing.R pricing.R 

And then, from R:

> setwd('/home/phuong') > data_abc <- read.csv('data_abc.csv') > data_def <- read.csv('data_def.csv') > source('pricing.R')