How to execute more than one RSQLite statement at once or how to dump a whole file?

Question

Working with RSQLite to build up a SQLite database I want to send more than one statement at a time - is this possible?

Why do these not work:

sql <- readLines("createtables.sql")
dbSendQuery(con,sql)

... and ...

sql <- paste(readLines("createtables.sql"),collapse="")
dbSendQuery(con,sql)

... and ...

sql <- paste(readLines("createtables.sql"),collapse="\n")
dbSendQuery(con,sql)

while these do:

sql <- "CREATE TABLE birthdays (
nameid INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT ,
firstname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL ,
lastname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL ,
birthday DATE ) ; "
dbSendQuery(con,sql)

sql <- "/* table def: foodtypes */
CREATE TABLE foodtypes (
foodid INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT ,
foodname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
healthy INTEGER,
`kcal/100g` float );"
dbSendQuery(con,sql)

the content of createtables.sql is:

/* table def:  birthdays */
CREATE TABLE birthdays (
nameid INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT ,
firstname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL ,
lastname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL ,
birthday DATE ) ;

/* table def: foodtypes */
CREATE TABLE foodtypes (
foodid INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT ,
foodname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
healthy INTEGER,
`kcal/100g` float );

Answer 1

As their simply seems no way to convince RSQLite-functions to execute more than one statement at once I wrote two functions that solve this problem:

(1) sqlFromFile() reads in SQL-files and transforms the text so that each statement covers exactly one line.

(2) dbSendQueries() is analogous to dbSendQuery() provided by RSQLite but applies the query-function to each line (each element of the vector) of the provided text so that a whole bunh of statements can be run.

# read in sql-statements and preformat them                                        
sqlFromFile <- function(file){
    require(stringr)
    sql <- readLines(file)
    sql <- unlist(str_split(paste(sql,collapse=" "),";"))
    sql <- sql[grep("^ *$", sql, invert=T)]
    sql
}

# apply query function to each element
dbSendQueries <- function(con,sql){
    dummyfunction <- function(sql,con){
        dbSendQuery(con,sql)
    }
    lapply(sql, dummyfunction, con)
}

# solution for example in question
dbSendQueries( con, sqlFromFile("createtables.sql") )