R: Visualizing Folder Paths

Question

I am working with the R programming language.

I am trying to make a network/tree visualization that shows all the folders, subfolders and files that are located on my computer.

I found the following code which can list all files/folders on my computer:

dirs <- list.dirs(path = ".", full.names = TRUE, recursive = TRUE)

From here, I want to make a network diagram visualization (e.g. using igraph) to show all the paths to folders, subfolders and files:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ajcb4n/i_made_a_graph_visualization_of_my_projects/

I found this post here that shows how to do this for a limited setting: How to build a dendrogram from a directory tree?

But I am trying to directly do this for this statement

dirs <- list.dirs(path = ".", full.names = TRUE, recursive = TRUE)

Can someone please show me how to do this?

Thanks!

My attempt:

library(igraph)
library(data.tree)

dirs <- list.dirs(path = ".", full.names = TRUE, recursive = TRUE)

edges <- data.frame(from = dirname(dirs), to = basename(dirs), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

g <- graph_from_data_frame(edges, directed=TRUE)

plot(g, layout=layout_as_tree)

Answer 1

You could do this using tidygraph and ggraph:

library(igraph)
library(tidygraph)
library(ggraph)

do.call('rbind', 
  strsplit(dirs, '/') |>
  lapply(\(x) sapply(seq_along(x), \(y) paste(x[1:y], collapse = '/'))) |>
  lapply(\(x) cbind(head(x, -1), tail(x, -1)))
  ) |>
  as.data.frame() |>
  unique() |>
  graph_from_data_frame() |>
  as_tbl_graph() %>%
  mutate(label = gsub('^.*/(.*)$', '\\1', name)) |>
  ggraph(layout = 'tree') + 
  geom_edge_diagonal(color = 'gray') +
  geom_node_point(shape = 21, fill = 'lightblue') +
  geom_node_text(aes(label = label), size = 3, nudge_x = 0.4) +
  coord_flip(clip = 'off') +
  scale_y_reverse() +
  theme_graph()

Answer 2

I have a few pointers: First, your Tree does not generate correctly, because dirnames does not give the name of the directory, but the whole name.

You can fix this by leaving out the basename function in the definition of your edges data.frame. This might also help with duplicate folder names. You can still change the names with

V(g)$name <- basename(V(g)$name)

Second, if you want to have all files and directories your first line should probably be

filesAndDirs <- list.files(path = ".", full.names = TRUE, recursive = TRUE, include.dirs = TRUE)

And finally, when plotting you should probably add the root of your tree:

plot(g, layout=layout_as_tree(g, root = 1))

I can't really help on making a beautiful graph, but I hope this helps anyway.

The whole code is:

library(igraph)

filesAndDirs <- list.files(path = ".",
                           full.names = TRUE, 
                           recursive = TRUE, 
                           include.dirs = TRUE)

edges <- data.frame(from = dirname(filesAndDirs), to = filesAndDirs, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

g <- graph_from_data_frame(edges, directed=TRUE)
V(g)$name <- basename(V(g)$name)

plot(g, layout=layout_as_tree(g, root = 1))