Thank you in advance for your're help. I am using R to analyse some data that is initially created in Matlab. I am using the package "R.Matlab" and it is fantastic for 1 file, but I am struggling to import multiple files.
The working script for a single file is as follows...
install.packages("R.matlab")
library(R.matlab)
x<-("folder_of_files")
path <- system.file("/home/ashley/Desktop/Save/2D Stream", package="R.matlab")
pathname <- file.path(x, "Test0000.mat")
data1 <- readMat(pathname)
And this works fantastic. The format of my files is 'Name_0000.mat' where between files the name is a constant and the 4 digits increase, but not necesserally by 1.
My attempt to load multiple files at once was along these lines...
for (i in 1:length(temp))
data1<-list()
{data1[[i]] <- readMat((get(paste(temp[i]))))}
And also in multiple other ways that included and excluded path and pathname from the loop, all of which give me the same error:
Error in get(paste(temp[i])) :
object 'Test0825.mat' not found
Where 0825 is my final file name. If you change the length of the loop it is always just the name of the final one.
I think the issue is that when it pastes the name it looks for that object, which as of yet does not exist so I need to have the pasted text in speach marks, yet I dont know how to do that.
Sorry this was such a long post....Many thanks
Related
Good morning everyone,
I am currently using the code written by Antonio Olinto Avila-da-Silva on this link: https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/forum/oceancolor/topic_show.pl?tid=5954
It allows me to extract data of type sst/chlor_a from nc file. It uses a loop to create an excel file with all the data. Unfortunately, I noticed that the function only takes the first data file in the loop. Thus, I find myself with 20 times the same data in a row in my excel file.
Does anyone have a solution to make this loop work properly?
I would first check out that these two lines contain all the files you are expecting:
(f <- list.files(".", pattern="*.L3m_MO_SST_sst_9km.nc",full.names=F))
(lf<-length(f))
And then there's a bug in the for-loop. This line:
data<-nc_open(f)
Needs to reference the iterator i, so change it to something like this:
data<-nc_open(f[[i]])
It appears both scripts have this same bug.
I have multiple .xls (~100MB) files from which I would like to load multiple sheets (from each) into R as a dataframe. I have tried various functions, such as xlsx::xlsx2 and XLConnect::readWorksheetFromFile, both of which always run for a very long time (>15 mins) and never finish and I have to force-quit RStudio to keep working.
I also tried gdata::read.xls, which does finish, but it takes more than 3 minutes per one sheet and it cannot extract multiple sheets at once (which would be very helpful to speed up my pipeline) like XLConnect::loadWorkbook can.
The time it takes these functions to execute (and I am not even sure the first two would ever finish if I let them go longer) is way too long for my pipeline, where I need to work with many files at once. Is there a way to get these to go/finish faster?
In several places, I have seen a recommendation to use the function readxl::read_xls, which seems to be widely recommended for this task and should be faster per sheet. This one, however, gives me an error:
> # Minimal reproducible example:
> setwd("/Users/USER/Desktop")
> library(readxl)
> data <- read_xls(path="test_file.xls")
Error:
filepath: /Users/USER/Desktop/test_file.xls
libxls error: Unable to open file
I also did some elementary testing to make sure the file exists and is in the correct format:
> # Testing existence & format of the file
> file.exists("test_file.xls")
[1] TRUE
> format_from_ext("test_file.xls")
[1] "xls"
> format_from_signature("test_file.xls")
[1] "xls"
The test_file.xls used above is available here.
Any advice would be appreciated in terms of making the first functions run faster or the read_xls run at all - thank you!
UPDATE:
It seems that some users are able to open the file above using the readxl::read_xls function, while others are not, both on Mac and Windows, using the most up to date versions of R, Rstudio, and readxl. The issue has been posted on the readxl GitHub and has not been resolved yet.
I downloaded your dataset and read each excel sheet in this way (for example, for sheets "Overall" and "Area"):
install.packages("readxl")
library(readxl)
library(data.table)
dt_overall <- as.data.table(read_excel("test_file.xls", sheet = "Overall"))
area_sheet <- as.data.table(read_excel("test_file.xls", sheet = "Area"))
Finally, I get dt like this (for example, only part of the dataset for the "Area" sheet):
Just as well, you can use the read_xls function instead read_excel.
I checked, it also works correctly and even a little faster, since read_excel is a wrapper over read_xls and read_xlsx functions from readxl package.
Also, you can use excel_sheets function from readxl package to read all sheets of your Excel file.
UPDATE
Benchmarking is done with microbenchmark package for the following packages/functions: gdata::read.xls, XLConnect::readWorksheetFromFile and readxl::read_excel.
But XLConnect it's a Java-based solution, so it requires a lot of RAM.
I found that I was unable to open the file with read_xl immediately after downloading it, but if I opened the file in Excel, saved it, and closed it again, then read_xl was able to open it without issue.
My suggested workaround for handling hundreds of files is to build a little C# command line utility that opens, saves, and closes an Excel file. Source code is below, the utility can be compiled with visual studio community edition.
using System.IO;
using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
namespace resaver
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string srcFile = Path.GetFullPath(args[0]);
Excel.Application excelApplication = new Excel.Application();
excelApplication.Application.DisplayAlerts = false;
Excel.Workbook srcworkBook = excelApplication.Workbooks.Open(srcFile);
srcworkBook.Save();
srcworkBook.Close();
excelApplication.Quit();
}
}
}
Once compiled, the utility can be called from R using e.g. system2().
I will propose a different workflow. If you happen to have LibreOffice installed, then you can convert your excel files to csv programatically. I have Linux, so I do it in bash, but I'm sure it can be possible in macOS.
So open a terminal and navigate to the folder with your excel files and run in terminal:
for i in *.xls
do soffice --headless --convert-to csv "$i"
done
Now in R you can use data.table::fread to read your files with a loop:
Scenario 1: the structure of files is different
If the structure of files is different, then you wouldn't want to rbind them together. You could run in R:
files <- dir("path/to/files", pattern = ".csv")
all_files <- list()
for (i in 1:length(files)){
fileName <- gsub("(^.*/)(.*)(.csv$)", "\\2", files[i])
all_files[[fileName]] <- fread(files[i])
}
If you want to extract your named elements within the list into the global environment, so that they can be converted into objects, you can use list2env:
list2env(all_files, envir = .GlobalEnv)
Please be aware of two things: First, in the gsub call, the direction of the slash. And second, list2env may overwrite objects in your Global Environment if they have the same name as the named elements within the list.
Scenario 2: the structure of files is the same
In that case it's likely you want to rbind them all together. You could run in R:
files <- dir("path/to/files", pattern = ".csv")
joined <- list()
for (i in 1:length(files)){
joined <- rbindlist(joined, fread(files[i]), fill = TRUE)
}
On my system, i had to use path.expand.
R> file = "~/blah.xls"
R> read_xls(file)
Error:
filepath: ~/Dropbox/signal/aud/rba/balsheet/data/a03.xls
libxls error: Unable to open file
R> read_xls(path.expand(file)) # fixed
Resaving your file and you can solve your problem easily.
I also find this problem before but I get the answer from your discussion.
I used the read_excel() to open those files.
I was seeing a similar error and wanted to share a short-term solution.
library(readxl)
download.file("https://mjwebster.github.io/DataJ/spreadsheets/MLBpayrolls.xls", "MLBPayrolls.xls")
MLBpayrolls <- read_excel("MLBpayrolls.xls", sheet = "MLB Payrolls", na = "n/a")
Yields (on some systems in my classroom but not others):
Error: filepath: MLBPayrolls.xls libxls error: Unable to open file
The temporary solution was to paste the URL of the xls file into Firefox and download it via the browser. Once this was done we could run the read_excel line without error.
This was happening today on Windows 10, with R 3.6.2 and R Studio 1.2.5033.
If you have downloaded the .xls data from the internet, even if you are opening it in Ms.Excel, it will open a prompt first asking to confirm if you trust the source, see below screenshot, I am guessing this is the reason R (read_xls) also can't open it, as it's considered unsafe. Save it as .xlsx file and then use read_xlsx() or read_excel().
Even thought this is not a code-based solution, I just changed the type file. For instance, instead of xls I saved as csv or xlsx. Then I opened it as regular one.
I worked it for me, because when I opened my xlsfile, I popped up the message: "The file format and extension of 'file.xls'' don't match. The file could be corrupted or unsafe..."
Using expss package I am creating cross tabs by reading SPSS files in R. This actually works perfectly but the process takes lots of time to load. I have a folder which contains various SPSS files(usually 3 files only) and through R script I am fetching the last modified file among the three.
setwd('/file/path/for/this/file/SPSS')
library(expss)
expss_output_viewer()
#get all .sav files
all_sav <- list.files(pattern ='\\.sav$')
#use file.info to get the index of the file most recently modified
pass<-all_sav[with(file.info(all_sav), which.max(mtime))]
mydata = read_spss(pass,reencode = TRUE) # read SPSS file mydata
w <- data.frame(mydata)
args <- commandArgs(TRUE)
Everything is perfect and works absolutely fine but it generally takes too much time to load large files(112MB,48MB for e.g) which isn't good.
Is there a way I can make it more time-efficient and takes less time to create the table. The dropdowns are created using PHP.
I have searched for this and found another library called 'haven' but I am not sure whether that can give me significance as well. Can anyone help me with this? I would really appreciate that. Thanks in advance.
As written in the expss vignette (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/expss/vignettes/labels-support.html) you can use in the following way:
# we need to load packages strictly in this order to avoid conflicts
library(haven)
library(expss)
spss_data = haven::read_spss("spss_file.sav")
# add missing 'labelled' class
spss_data = add_labelled_class(spss_data)
I have 500+ .json files that I am trying to get a specific element out of. I cannot figure out why I cannot read more than one at a time..
This works:
library (jsonlite)
files<-list.files(‘~/JSON’)
file1<-fromJSON(readLines(‘~/JSON/file1.json),flatten=TRUE)
result<-as.data.frame(source=file1$element$subdata$data)
However, regardless of using different json packages (eg RJSONIO), I cannot apply this to the entire contents of files. The error I continue to get is...
attempt to run same code as function over all contents in file list
for (i in files) {
fromJSON(readLines(i),flatten = TRUE)
as.data.frame(i)$element$subdata$data}
My goal is to loop through all 500+ and extract the data and its contents. Specifically if the file has the element ‘subdata$data’, i want to extract the list and put them all in a dataframe.
Note: files are being read as ASCII (Windows OS). This does bot have a negative effect on single extractions but for the loop i get ‘invalid character bytes’
Update 1/25/2019
Ran the following but returned errors...
files<-list.files('~/JSON')
out<-lapply(files,function (fn) {
o<-fromJSON(file(i),flatten=TRUE)
as.data.frame(i)$element$subdata$data
})
Error in file(i): object 'i' not found
Also updated function, this time with UTF* errors...
files<-list.files('~/JSON')
out<-lapply(files,function (i,fn) {
o<-fromJSON(file(i),flatten=TRUE)
as.data.frame(i)$element$subdata$data
})
Error in parse_con(txt,bigint_as_char):
lexical error: invalid bytes in UTF8 string. (right here)------^
Latest Update
Think I found out a solution to the crazy 'bytes' problem. When I run readLines on the .json file, I can then apply fromJSON),
e.x.
json<-readLines('~/JSON')
jsonread<-fromJSON(json)
jsondf<-as.data.frame(jsonread$element$subdata$data)
#returns a dataframe with the correct information
Problem is, I cannot apply readLines to all the files within the JSON folder (PATH). If I can get help with that, I think I can run...
files<-list.files('~/JSON')
for (i in files){
a<-readLines(i)
o<-fromJSON(file(a),flatten=TRUE)
as.data.frame(i)$element$subdata}
Needed Steps
apply readLines to all 500 .json files in JSON folder
apply fromJSON to files from step.1
create a data.frame that returns entries if list (fromJSON) contains $element$subdata$data.
Thoughts?
Solution (Workaround?)
Unfortunately, the fromJSON still runs in to trouble with the .json files. My guess is that my GET method (httr) is unable to wait/delay and load the 'pretty print' and thus is grabbing the raw .json which in-turn is giving odd characters and as a result giving the ubiquitous '------^' error. Nevertheless, I was able to put together a solution, please see below. I want to post it for future folks that may have the same problem with the .json files not working nicely with any R json package.
#keeping the same 'files' variable as earlier
raw_data<-lapply(files,readLines)
dat<-do.call(rbind,raw_data)
dat2<-as.data.frame(dat,stringsasFactors=FALSE)
#check to see json contents were read-in
dat2[1,1]
library(tidyr)
dat3<-separate_rows(dat2,sep='')
x<-unlist(raw_data)
x<-gsub('[[:punct:]]', ' ',x)
#Identify elements wanted in original .json and apply regex
y<-regmatches(x,regexc('.*SubElement2 *(.*?) *Text.*',x))
for loops never return anything, so you must save all valuable data yourself.
You call as.data.frame(i) which is creating a frame with exactly one element, the filename, probably not what you want to keep.
(Minor) Use fromJSON(file(i),...).
Since you want to capture these into one frame, I suggest something along the lines of:
out <- lapply(files, function(fn) {
o <- fromJSON(file(fn), flatten = TRUE)
as.data.frame(o)$element$subdata$data
})
allout <- do.call(rbind.data.frame, out)
### alternatives:
allout <- dplyr::bind_rows(out)
allout <- data.table::rbindlist(out)
I'm still a rookie to the R world, in a very accelerated class with limited/no guidance. My assignment is to build a custom function that reads in a specific .csv, and take some specific columns out to be analyzed. Could anyone please offer some advice? The "sample code" I was given looks like this:
AnnualLekSurvey=function(data.in,stat.year){
d1=subset(data.in,year==stat.year)
d2=d1[c("year","complex","tot_male")]
attach(d2)}
So when it's complete and I run it, I should be able to say:
AnnualLekSurvey(gsg_lek,2006)
where "gsg_lek" is the name of the file I want to import, and 2006 is the values from the "year" column that I want to subset. "complex" and "tot_male" will be the variable to be analyzed by "year", but I'm not worried about that code right now.
What I'm confused about is; how do I tell R that gsg_lek is a .csv file, and tell it to look in the proper directory for it when I run the custom function?
I saw one other vaguely similar example on here, and they had to use the if() and paste() commands to build the string of the file name - that seems like too much arbitrary work, unless I'm just being lazy...
Any help would be appreciated.
You can make a function like this:
AnnualLekSurvey <- function(csvFile, stat.year)
{
d1 <- read.csv(paste("C:/",csvFile,".csv", sep=""),header=T, sep=",")
d2 <- subset(d1, year==stat.year)
d2 <- d2[, c("year","complex","tot_male")]
return(d2)
}
The argument 'csvFile' in the function is the basename of your csv file. In this particular example, this has to be in your C:/ folder. If your file is in some other folder, you have to change the "C:/" in the function to the folder where your csv file is located.
Running the function:
data <- AnnualLekSurvey("gsg_lek", "2006")
Note that the arguments has to be within the quotes. 'data' will now contain the columns year, complex and tot_male of gsg_lek.csv corresponding to the year 2006