How do you read multiple .txt files into R? [duplicate]

You can try this:

filelist = list.files(pattern = ".*.txt")#assuming tab separated values with a header    datalist = lapply(filelist, function(x)read.table(x, header=T)) #assuming the same header/columns for all filesdatafr = do.call("rbind", datalist) 

There are three fast ways to read multiple files and put them into a single data frame or data table

First get the list of all txt files (including those in sub-folders)

list_of_files <- list.files(path = ".", recursive = TRUE,                            pattern = "\\.txt$",                             full.names = TRUE)

1) Use fread() w/ rbindlist() from the data.table package

#install.packages("data.table", repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com")library(data.table)# Read all the files and create a FileName column to store filenamesDT <- rbindlist(sapply(list_of_files, fread, simplify = FALSE),                use.names = TRUE, idcol = "FileName")

2) Use readr::read_table2() w/ purrr::map_df() from the tidyverse framework:

#install.packages("tidyverse", #                 dependencies = TRUE, repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com")library(tidyverse)# Read all the files and create a FileName column to store filenamesdf <- list_of_files %>%  set_names(.) %>%  map_df(read_table2, .id = "FileName")

3) (Probably the fastest out of the three) Use vroom::vroom():

#install.packages("vroom", #                 dependencies = TRUE, repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com")library(vroom)# Read all the files and create a FileName column to store filenamesdf <- vroom(list_of_files, .id = "FileName")   

Note: to clean up file names, use basename or gsub functions

Benchmark: readr vs data.table vs vroom for big data

Edit 1: to read multiple csv files and skip the header using readr::read_csv

list_of_files <- list.files(path = ".", recursive = TRUE,                            pattern = "\\.csv$",                             full.names = TRUE)df <- list_of_files %>%  purrr::set_names(nm = (basename(.) %>% tools::file_path_sans_ext())) %>%  purrr::map_df(read_csv,                 col_names = FALSE,                skip = 1,                .id = "FileName")

Edit 2: to convert a pattern including a wildcard into the equivalent regular expression, use glob2rx()

There is a really, really easy way to do this now: the readtext package.

readtext::readtext("path_to/your_files/*.txt")

It really is that easy.