Uploading, reading and naming multiple files from a Network directory in R

Question

I am trying to read several .xlsx files from a network directory that has this path:

\\181.01.2\Global_Office_Net\Accounting Inside this folder there are several other folders (around 15) and in each of these folders are several files but each folder does have a .xlsx file with a name that starts with "overall_counts_123" the "123" could be any number but the name of the files will always start with "overall_counts" and my goal is to have all files uploaded to Rstudio and rename them with the tag "file1", "file2" etc, I apologize if I'm not being clear let me set an example:

If there are 3 folders in the directory and each folder has "n" files that start with "overall_counts" I would like to get only something like this:

\\181.01.2\Global_Office_Net\Accounting\folder1\overall_counts1.xlsx

\\181.01.2\Global_Office_Net\Accounting\folder2\overall_counts1.xlsx

\\181.01.2\Global_Office_Net\Accounting\folder2\overall_counts15.xlsx

\\181.01.2\Global_Office_Net\Accounting\folder3\overall_counts1008.xlsx

I'm using this code:

file_paths<-fs::dir_ls("\\181.01.2\Global_Office_Net\Accounting")

FILES<-file_paths %>% 
map(function(path){
  read_xlsx(path)})

But instead of looking in each folder for the files that start with "overall_counts" this is uploading everything and somehow making a list of them... when what I really looking for is to have each desired file uploaded as file2, file2 and so on in separates dataframes I will be so thankful if you could please reference an article on how to upload files based in a criteria for the name of the file and upload them separately thank you so much guys I truly owe you this one

Answer 1

You can try this:

Get a list of the files that match, looking in all the subfolders (recursive = TRUE)

filenames <- list.files(path = "\\\\181.01.2\\Global_Office_Net\\Accounting\\", 
                        pattern = "overall_counts[0-9]+\\.xlsx", 
                        recursive = TRUE)

Tag with "file1", "file2", etc.

fns <- setNames(filenames, paste0("file", 1:length(filenames)))  

Now read these files into R:

library(readxl)
dfs <- lapply(fns, read_xlsx)

This results in a list of dataframes (tibbles) like so: dfs$file1, dfs$file2, etc.