I suppose you have your filenames stored in a character vector, which I will name "myfiles". (Within R, it is not a "list"; lists have a special structure).
There is no such thing as a "tab separated matrix" in R. "tab separated" would refer to the file, I presume. for (nm in myfiles) { tmpdat <- read.table(nm, ## put appropriate arguments here ) tmpmat <- as.matrix(tmpdat) ## might or might give you what you want, ## depending on what is in the files ## it might make sense to use scan() instead, depending on how ## your text files are structured. ## do whatever with tmpdat or tmpmat } When the loop is done, however, tmpdat and tmpmat will have only the values from the last file. Saving all of them for later use is a different question. Often, you will get better help from r-help if you show what you have tried, by which I mean showing some R code. As much as possible, using examples that other people can run for themselves. (See the posting guide) Hope this helps -Don -- Don MacQueen Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627 Livermore, CA 94550 925-423-1062 On 2/28/13 4:30 AM, "Sahana Srinivasan" <sahanasrinivasan...@gmail.com> wrote: Hello :) I'm just starting out with R and would appreciate your help with a couple of problems I am running into. I have used Sys.glob to get a list of all filenames having a particular file extension (in my case, *.txt) I would now like to use this list in the following manner: I would like to use each filename from the list and open that file into a tab separated matrix and proceed. How can I go about iterating through each filename in the list and then opening each of the files? I believe as.matrix can be used to open the txt file as a table, is that correct? I know these are beginner queries but I would love your help. Thank you in advance :) [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.