Add File Extension To All Files In A Folder In R

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1 Add file extension to all files in a folder in R

Problem Description:

As a result from a loop I have a lot of files without a file extension in a folder.

How could I add a file extension (.png) to all files in the folder while keeping the original name, e.g. from NAME1 to NAME1.png, NAME3 to NAME3.png, NAME6 to NAME6.png etc using R?

Solution – 1

With the list.files function you can retrieve the file names under a given path and with a given pattern. From them you can use paste to add your file extension and next file.rename to rename the files. For instance:

    oldNames<-list.files(...) #some argument here
    newNames<-paste(sep="",oldNames,".png")
    for (i in 1:length(oldNames)) file.rename(oldNames[i],newNames[i])

Solution – 2

Install the pathological package and use replace_extension.

library(devtools)
install_github("pathological", "richierocks")

library(pathological)
old_filenames <- paste0("NAME", 1:6)
new_filenames <- replace_extension(, "png")
file.rename(old_filenames, new_filenames)

Solution – 3

The solution proposed above could be generalised to allow for changes file extension (in the case below from .xls to .html):

path <- "D:/Projects/"

xls_files <- paste(path, list.files(path, pattern = "*.xls"), sep = "")
html_files <- paste(sep="", gsub(".xls", ".html", xls_files))
file.rename(xls_files, html_files)

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