How to use Rstudio relative paths

Question

How can I use relative paths in a RStudio project environment?

For example, to access a file, I use the whole path:

# My RStudio project working directory:  getwd() [1] "C:/Users/MaurizioLocale/OneDrive/Data_Science/10_Capstone_project/      CP_Natural_Language/MY_FILE.txt" 

But it is really long.

I am trying to use paths relative to the working environment. I tried something conceptually similar to:

"~/MY_FILE.txt" 

where ~ represents the working environment. Unfortunately, it does not work.

Answer 1

You could change the working directory. Get the address in the beginning getwd(), replace it by your project folder with setwd(). Then, when accessing a file just use read.table("./folder/file.R").

Answer 2

The so-called here package is really useful for avoiding absolute paths in (as well as outside of) RStudio. Suppose you have an RStudio project and want to access the file /data/file.txt. This would be done as follows. This way, you don't have to mess around with getwd(), just work relative to your project root using here().

library(here) #> here() starts at C:/test/someproject here("data", "file.txt") #> "C:/test/someproject/data/file.txt" readLines(here("data", "file.txt")) #> "The here package is awesome!" 

How here figures out where your project root is is described in ?here and also in the "Ode to the here package" by Jenny Bryan.