Hi everybody
I have a large number of Excel speadsheets that I want to merge into one R
dataframe to process. I can read them one by one with read.xls but I really
need a function to read a whole directory at once and merge the columns with
the same name into a single dataframe.
here is what I have thus far (on Mac OS X 10.5.2. for R 2.8.0):
# Define the directory where the data is
path="/Users/home/mydata/"
# Make a list of the filenames (they are all .xls so no need for a regular
expression seekig out ones ending in .xls )
files=list.files(path="/Users/home/mydata/")
# Read them into a list called data
data=tapply(paste(path,files,sep=""),files[1:length(files)],read.xls)
This gives the data in a list. What I want is a dataframe. I can turn it
into a matrix with as.matrix() but that only has one column which is more or
less the same as a list.
I have tried to merge different parts of the list :
mdata=date.frame(merge(data[[1]],data[[2]]))
but that gives an empty data frame (with the correct variable names).
Even if it worked I need a way to do that with a large number of file (i.e.
not manualy). I also tried to use lapply with merge as function but that
didn't work either
Does anyone have any ideas? I would much appreciate it
regards
Chrisitiaan
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