How do I programmatically locate my Google Drive folder using R?

Question

This is the same question as here, except I needed to do that in R.

Locating the google drive folder on the computer is useful when you need to access a file within the google drive folder, but this google driver folder has different paths on your different computers, which makes the sharing of script difficult.

I have not found solutions on how to do that in R, so I thought it might be useful, for anyone else having the same question, to open a thread here. I have prepared a solution for R based on the link above.

I would be glad to read a better/simpler solution than the one I will present here.

In addition, my solution will likely only work for Windows users, so a solution for other OS or a more general cross-OS solution would be welcome.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 30 '21 at 12:40

The idea is to access the google drive file database with the RSQLite library, and execute a query which will return the root path of the google drive folder. The following code executes this:

# Get the path to the google drive database
googledrivedb <- paste0(Sys.getenv("LOCALAPPDATA"), "/Google\\Drive\\user_default\\sync_config.db")
# Correct backslashes to slashes so that R can interact with the folders
googledrivedb <- gsub("\\\\", "/", googledrivedb)

# Load SQL interface libraries
library(DBI)
library(RSQLite)

# Connect to the google drive file database
con <-dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), dbname = googledrivedb)

# Make a query which will return the path to the root folder of google drive
path <- dbGetQuery(con, "select * from data where entry_key='local_sync_root_path'")$data_value

# Remove unnecessary characters in the path (I had "\\\?\" in my path - I don't know how it will look like on other computers)
path <- substring(path,
                  5)
# Correct backslashes to slashes so that R can interact with the folders
path <- gsub("\\\\", "/", path)
# Close the connection to the database
dbDisconnect(con)

# Show the obtained path
path

In my case the result was: "C:/Google Drive"

How do I programmatically locate my Google Drive folder using R?

1 Answers1