appendornot

The goal of appendornot is to provide easy access to writing and appending csv or text files.

Installation

You can install the development version of appendornot like so:

## install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("favstats/appendornot")

Load Library

library(appendornot)

Motivation for appendornot

I often find myself in the situation where I am scraping data and I want to keep appending some data to a file. However, I also want to make it so that it creates the file in the first place if it doesn’t exist yet, then appends to it in the next iteration.

Example save_csv()

Write csv file with save_csv. The function will automatically create a new csv or append the file if it already does exist.

save_csv(cars, "cars.csv")

You can also create a folder (if it doesn’t exist yet) before it saves the csv. Just specify: create_subfolders = TRUE.

This example creates the “data” folder first, then saves the file:

save_csv(cars, "data/cars.csv", create_subfolders = TRUE)

Different order and new variables to be appended (or are missing)

Note: save_csv will automatically handle column order and column names that may not be present/are being added to the (appended) data.

## this data to be appended has a new column 
new_column_dat <- cars %>% mutate(thisisnownew = "hello")

## this is a different order than the original dataset
different_order <- cars %>% select(dist, speed)

## this is a new column with a different order and missing a variable that is already there
different_order_newcolumn <- new_column_dat %>% select(dist, thisisnownew)

All of these cases will be automatically handled by the save_csv function:

save_csv(new_column_dat, "cars.csv")

save_csv(different_order, "cars.csv")

save_csv(different_order_newcolumn, "cars.csv")

Example save_lines()

Write text file with save_lines. The function will automatically create a new text file or append the file if it already does exist.

save_lines(names(cars), "lines.txt")

You can also create a folder (if it doesn’t exist yet) before it saves the text file.

This example creates the “txt” folder first, then saves the file:

save_lines(names(cars),  "txt/lines.txt")