R: Loop to Read Multiple Excel Files in List [duplicate] - r

Question

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How to import multiple .csv files at once?
(15 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I have two lists, one with the excel file paths that I would like to read and another list with the file names that I would like to assign to each as a dataframe. Trying to create a loop using the below code but the loop only creates a single dataframe with name n. Any idea how to make this work?
files <- c("file1.xlsx","file2.xlsx")
names <- c('name1','name2')
for (f in files) {
for (n in names) {
n <- read_excel(path = f)
}
}

Answer 1

You are overwriting n on each iteration of the loop
Edit:
#Parfait commented that we shouldn't use assign if we can avoid it, and he is right (e.g. why-is-using-assign-bad)
This does not use assign and puts the data in a neat list:
files <- c("file1.xlsx","file2.xlsx")
names <- c('name1','name2')
result <- list()
for (i in seq_along(files)) {
result[names[i]] <- read_excel(path = files[i]))
}
Old and not recommended answer (only left here for transparency reasons):
We can use assign to use a character string as variable name:
files <- c("file1.xlsx","file2.xlsx")
names <- c('name1','name2')
for (i in seq_along(files)) {
assign(names[i], read_excel(path = files[i]))
}

Answer 2

An alternative is to loop through all Excel files in a folder, rather than a list. I'm assuming they exist in some kind of folder, somewhere.
# load names of excel files
files = list.files(path = "C:/your_path_here/", full.names = TRUE, pattern = ".xlsx")
# create function to read multiple sheets per excel file
read_excel_allsheets <- function(filename, tibble = FALSE) {
sheets <- readxl::excel_sheets(filename)
sapply(sheets, function(f) as.data.frame(readxl::read_excel(filename, sheet = f)),
simplify = FALSE)
}
# execute function for all excel files in "files"
all_data <- lapply(files, read_excel_allsheets)
Updated...