Read multiple CSV files into separate data frames

Question

Suppose we have files file1.csv, file2.csv, ... , and file100.csv in directory C:\R\Data and we want to read them all into separate data frames (e.g. file1, file2, ... , and file100).

The reason for this is that, despite having similar names they have different file structures, so it is not that useful to have them in a list.

I could use lapply but that returns a single list containing 100 data frames. Instead I want these data frames in the Global Environment.

How do I read multiple files directly into the global environment? Or, alternatively, How do I unpack the contents of a list of data frames into it?

Answer 1

Thank you all for replying.

For completeness here is my final answer for loading any number of (tab) delimited files, in this case with 6 columns of data each where column 1 is characters, 2 is factor, and remainder numeric:

##Read files named xyz1111.csv, xyz2222.csv, etc.
filenames <- list.files(path="../Data/original_data",
    pattern="xyz+.*csv")

##Create list of data frame names without the ".csv" part 
names <-substr(filenames,1,7)

###Load all files
for(i in names){
    filepath <- file.path("../Data/original_data/",paste(i,".csv",sep=""))
    assign(i, read.delim(filepath,
    colClasses=c("character","factor",rep("numeric",4)),
    sep = "\t"))
}

Answer 2

Quick draft, untested:

1. Use list.files() aka dir() to dynamically generate your list of files.

2. This returns a vector, just run along the vector in a for loop.

3. Read the i-th file, then use assign() to place the content into a new variable file_i

That should do the trick for you.

Answer 3

Use assign with a character variable containing the desired name of your data frame.

for(i in 1:100)
{
   oname = paste("file", i, sep="")
   assign(oname, read.csv(paste(oname, ".txt", sep="")))
}

Answer 4

This answer is intended as a more useful complement to Hadley's answer.

While the OP specifically wanted each file read into their R workspace as a separate object, many other people naively landing on this question may think that that's what they want to do, when in fact they'd be better off reading the files into a single list of data frames.

So for the record, here's how you might do that.

#If the path is different than your working directory
# you'll need to set full.names = TRUE to get the full
# paths.
my_files <- list.files("path/to/files")

#Further arguments to read.csv can be passed in ...
all_csv <- lapply(my_files,read.csv,...)

#Set the name of each list element to its
# respective file name. Note full.names = FALSE to
# get only the file names, not the full path.
names(all_csv) <- gsub(".csv","",
                       list.files("path/to/files",full.names = FALSE),
                       fixed = TRUE)

Now any of the files can be referred to by my_files[["filename"]], which really isn't much worse that just having separate filename variables in your workspace, and often it is much more convenient.