How to import the latest published excel file in R?

Question

I have a folder with several excel files. I can read the file with the readxl function. However, I would like to know if there is any option to read the last published file in the folder. Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Using the file.info function as suggested by @vincent-guillemot, we can use the below code to find latest file.

my_folder <- "C:/Users/katti/My Drive/Dropbox/07_Learning"

files_in_folder <- list.files(my_folder, pattern = ".xlsx", full.names = TRUE, recursive = TRUE)

xlsx_df <- file.info(files_in_folder)

xlsx_df$filename <- rownames(xlsx_df)

xlsx_df[xlsx_df$ctime == min(xlsx_df$ctime),"filename"]
#> [1] "C:/Users/katti/My Drive/Dropbox/07_Learning/Blank_CF - Copy.xlsx"

Not the recursive=TRUE argument in list.files. This allows you to also look into subfolders and search for .xlsx files. Set it to FALSE if you only want to search in current folder.