Read, subset and bind many .txt files in R

Question

I would like to read many .txt files, ignoring the first line and just getting the fifth column. After that, merge all these columns extracted into a data.frame.

I made these with a for loop, building a lot of variables with assign() and then getting all with mget(ls()).

Is there any faster way to do this?

Here are three of these files: we.tl/t-JcVsfiUPLv

You can include the code that you currently have. – Ronak Shah Oct 13 '21 at 13:46 — Ronak Shah, Oct 13 '21 at 13:46

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 13 '21 at 13:51

1

assign should usually be avoided and in this case we don't need to create these objects in global environment. Try using lapply.

#List all text files in the working directory
filenames <- list.files(pattern = '\\.txt$')
#Read every text file with header, skipping the 1st row. 
#Keep only the 5th column after reading the data. 
result <- lapply(filenames, function(x) read.table(x,skip = 1,header = TRUE)[,5])
result

answered Oct 13 '21 at 13:51

Ronak Shah

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Thanks for the answer! And then i would use something like cbind? I still need to join these vectors in a single table – Bryan Souza Oct 13 '21 at 14:18
1

`do.call(cbind, result)` ? – Ronak Shah Oct 13 '21 at 14:19

Read, subset and bind many .txt files in R

1 Answers1