Read several PDF files into R with pdf_text - r

I have several PDF files in my directory. I have downloaded them previously, no big deal so far.
I want to read all those files in R. My idea was to use the "pdf_text" function from the "pdftools" package and write a formula like this:
mypdftext <- pdf_text(files)
Where "files" is an object that gathers all the PDF file names, so that I don't have to write manually all the names. Because I have actually downlaoded a lot of files, it would avoid me to write:
mypdftext <- pdf_text("file1.pdf", "file2.pdf", and many more files...)
To create the object "pdflist", I used "files <- list.files (pattern = "pdf$")"
The “files” vector contains all the PDF file names.
But "files" does not work with pdf_text function, probably because it's a vector. What can I do instead?

maybe this is not the best solution but this works for me:
library(pdftools)
# Set your path here.
your_path = 'C:/Users/.../pdf_folder'
setwd(your_path)
getwd()
lf = list.files(path=getwd(), pattern=NULL, all.files=FALSE,
full.names=FALSE)
#Creating a list to iterate
my_pdfs = {}
#Iterate. Asssign each element of list files, to a list.
for (i in 1:length(lf)){my_pdfs[i] <- pdf_text(lf[i])}
#Calling the first pdf of the list.
my_pdfs[1]
Then you can assign each of the pdfs to a single file of whatever you want. Of course, each file will be saved in each element of the list. Does this solve your problem?

You could try using lapply over the vector that contains the location of every pdf file (files). I would recommend using list.files(..., full.names = T) to get the complete location of each pdf file. This should work.
mypdfs<-lapply(files, pdf_text)

Related

Creating objects from all .xlsx documents in working directory

I am trying to create objects from all files in working directory with name of the original file. I tried to go the following way, but couldn't solve appearing problems.
# - SETTING WD
getwd()
setwd("PATH TO THE FILE")
library(readxl)
# - CREATING OBJECTS
file_objects <- list.files()
xlsx_objects <- unlist(grep(".xlsx",file_objects,value = T))
for (i in xlsx_objects) {
xlsx_objects[i] <- read_xlsx(xlsx_objects[i], header = T)
}
I tried to paste [i]item from "xlsx_objects" with path to WD but it only created a list of files names from docs in WD.
I also find information, that read.csv can read only one file at the time, but I guess that it should be the case with for loop, right? It is reading only one file at the time.
Using lapply (as described in this forum) I was able to get the data in the environment, but argument header didn't work, I lost names of my docs in that object which does not have desired structure. I am though looking for having these files in separated objects without calling every document exclusively.
IIUC, you could do something like:
files = list.files("PATH TO THE FILE", full.names = T, pattern = 'xlsx')
list_files = map(files, readxl::read_excel)
(You can't use read.csv to read excel files)
Also I recommend reading about R Projects so you don't have to use setwd() ever again, which makes your code harder to reproduce down the pipeline

parameter not passed to the function when using walk function in PURRR package

I am using the purrr:walk to read multiple excel files and it failed. I have 3 questions:
(1) I used the function list.files to read the excel file list in one folder. But the returned values also included the subfolders. I tried set value for the parameters recursive= and include.dirs=, but it didn't work.
setwd(file_path)
files<-as_tibble(list.files(file_path,recursive=F,include.dirs=F)) %>%
filter(str_detect(value,".xlsx"))
files
(2) When I used the following piece of code, it can run without any error or warning message, but there is no returned data.
###read the excel data
file_read <- function(value1) {
print(value1)
file1<-read_excel(value1,sheet=1)
}
walk(files$value,file_read)
When I used the following, it worked. Not sure why.
test<-read_excel(files$value,sheet=1)
(3) In Q2, actually I want to create file1 to file6, suppose there are 6 excel files. How can I dynamically assign the dataset name?
list.files has pattern argument where you can specify what kind of files you are looking for. This will help you avoid filter(str_detect(value,".xlsx")) step. Also list.files only returns the files that are included in the main directory (file_path) and not it's subdirectory unless you specify recursive = TRUE.
library(readxl)
setwd(file_path)
files <- list.files(pattern = '\\.xlsx')
In the function you need to return the object.
file_read <- function(value1) {
data <- read_excel(value1,sheet=1)
return(data)
}
Now you can use map/lapply to read the files.
result <- purrr::map(files,file_read)

How to read jpeg files in R one by one using loop?

I have jpeg files in my local directory, I want to Extract text from all the images one by one and should record all the values in each cells accordingly . Can anyone please help me with the code? I have used Tesseract apnd Magick package to extract the text. But now I need to keep it in the loop
First of all, you have to know which files you want to read. Go to the directory where they are located and get their names with list.files.
old_dir <- getwd()
setwd('path/to/directory')
filenames <- list.files(pattern = '\\.jpg') # or '\\.jpeg'
Now the standard trick is to loop through the file names with one of the *apply functions. For the sake of simplicity, I will define a function that do the actual read and OCR text extraction operations.
library(magick)
library(tesseract)
read_ocr_png <- function(file){
img <- image_read(file)
image_ocr(img)
}
text_list <- lapply(filenames, read_ocr_png)
names(text_list) <- filenames
And reset the working directory when done.
setwd(old_dir)

Importing files with almost similar path and name

I have many txt files that I want to import into R. These files are imported one by one, I do the operations that I want, and then I import the next file.
All these files are located in a database system where all the folders have almost the same names, e.g.
database\type4\system50
database\type6\system50
database\type4\system30
database\type4\system50
Similarly, the names of the files are also almost the same, referring to the folder where they are positioned, e.g..
type4.system50.txt
type6.system50.txt
type4.system30.txt
type4.system50.txt
I have heard that there should be a easier way of importing these many files one by one, than simply multiple setwd and read.csv2 commands. As far as I understand this is possible by the macro import function in SAS, where you specify an overall path and then for each time you want to import a file you specify what is specific about this file name/folder name.
Is there a similar function in R? I tried to look at
Importing Data in R like SAS macro
, but this question did not really show me how to specify the folder name/file name.
Thank you for your help.
If you want to specify folder name / file name, try this
databasepath="path/to/database"
## list all files
list.files(getwd(),recursive = T,full.names = T,include.dirs = T) -> tmp
## filter files you want to read
readmyfile <- function(foldername,filename){
tmp[which(grepl(foldername,tmp) & grepl(filename,tmp))]
}
files_to_read <- readmyfile("type4", "system50")
some_files <- lapply(files_to_read, read.csv2)
## Or you can read all of them (if memory is large enough to hold them)
all_files <- lapply(tmp,read.csv2)
Instead of using setwd continuously, you could specify the absolute path for each file, save all of the paths to a vector, loop through the vector of paths and load the files into a list
library(data.table)
file_dir <- "path/to/files/"
file_vec <- list.files(path = file_dir, pattern = "*.txt")
file_list <- list()
for (n in 1:length(file_list)){
file_list[[n]] <- fread(input = paste0(file_dir, file_vec[n]))
}

How to read a csv file or load an excel workbook by ignoring some characters in the file path?

I'm writing a loop script which involves reading a file from a workbook (using the package XLConnect). The challenge is that the file names contain characters (representing time) that I want to ignore.
For example, here are 3 paths to those files:
G://User//Documents//daily_data//Op_Schedule_20160520_132025.xlsx
G://User//Documents//daily_data//Op_Schedule_20160521_142805.xlsx
G://User//Documents//daily_data//Op_Schedule_20160522_103052.xlsx
I need to import hundreds of those files. I can easily account for the character string representing the date (e.g. 20160522), but not the time.
Is there a way to tell R to ignore some characters located in the file path? Here is how I was thinking of writing my script (the "???" is where i need help). I know a loop is probably not the most efficient way, but i'm open to suggestions, should you have any:
require(XLConnect)
path= "G://User//Documents//daily_data//Op_Schedule_"
wd.seq = format(seq(as.Date("2014-01-01"),as.Date("2016-12-31"),"days"),format="%Y%m%d")
scheduleList = rep(list(matrix(1,1,1)),length(wd.seq))
for(i in 1:length(wd.seq)) {
wb = loadWorkbook(file= paste0(path,wd.seq[i],"???",".xlxs"))
scheduleList[[i]] = readWorksheet(wb,sheet='=SCHEDULE', header = TRUE)
}
`
Thanks for reading and suggestions, if any.
Mathieu
I don't know if this is helpful, but if you want to read all the files in a certain directory (which it seems to me is what you're after), you can read all the filenames into a list using the list.files() function, for example
fileList <- list.files(""G://User//Documents//daily_data//")
And then load the xlsx files looping through the list with a for loop
for(i in fileList) {
loadWorkbook(file = i)
}
I haven't used the XLConnect function before so that exact code probably doesn't work, but the loop will iterate through all the files in that directory and so you can construct your loading call using the i variable for the filename (it won't be an absolute path though, so you might need to use paste to add the first part of the filepath)
I realize there might be other files in the directory that are not excel files, you could use grepl to select only files containg "OP_Schedule_"
fileListClean <- fileList[grepl("Op_Schedule_",fileList)]
or perhaps only selecting .xlsx files in the directory:
fileListClean <- fileList[grepl(".xlsx",fileList)]
Edit to fit your reply:
Since you need to fit it to a sequence, you can do it as you did earlier:
wd.seq = format(seq(as.Date("2014-01-01"),as.Date("2016-12-31"),"days"),format="%Y%m%d")
wd.seq2 <- paste("Op_Schedule_", wd.seq, sep = "")
And then use grepl to only pick files starting with that extensions:
fileListClean <- fileList[grepl(paste(wd.seq2, collapse = "|"), fileList)]
Full disclosure: The last part i got from this SO answer: grep using a character vector with multiple patterns

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