Using R to list all files with a specified extension

Question

files <- list.files(pattern = "\\.dbf$")

$ at the end means that this is end of string. "dbf$" will work too, but adding \\. (. is special character in regular expressions so you need to escape it) ensure that you match only files with extension .dbf (in case you have e.g. .adbf files).

Try this which uses globs rather than regular expressions so it will only pick out the file names that end in .dbf

filenames <- Sys.glob("*.dbf")

Peg the pattern to find "\\.dbf" at the end of the string using the $ character:

list.files(pattern = "\\.dbf$")

I am not very good in using sophisticated regular expressions, so I'd do such task in the following way:

files <- list.files()
dbf.files <- files[-grep(".xml", files, fixed=T)]

First line just lists all files from working dir. Second one drops everything containing ".xml" (grep returns indices of such strings in 'files' vector; subsetting with negative indices removes corresponding entries from vector). "fixed" argument for grep function is just my whim, as I usually want it to peform crude pattern matching without Perl-style fancy regexprs, which may cause surprise for me.

I'm aware that such solution simply reflects drawbacks in my education, but for a novice it may be useful =) at least it's easy.