重命名R中的文件

Question

I have problem with renaming files from R .

In my folder on Desktop there are 10 files:

račun 1.xlsx

račun 2.xlsx

...

račun 10.xlsx

I have tried the following:

files <- list.files(path = "myfolder")
file.rename(files,
        paste0("novi_", 1:10, ".xlsx"))

This is what I get as an outcome:

[1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE

I suppose this is because of unicode character č, but I do not know how to find a solution for this.

Answer 1

EDIT 2: The solution here was for the OP to change the Region settings in Control Panel, setting format to be in Serbian(Latin, Serbia).

EDIT 1: See the comments: the OP is on a Windows machine. Here the problem is that list.files() (and presumably dir() , since they call the same .Internal) is converting the non ASCII filenames to ASCII, but Windows is expecting file.exists() to send it the unicode filenames, (and presumably also file.rename() )

Try:

file.rename(gsub("c", "č", files), paste0("novi_", seq_along(files, ".xlsx"))
# could work, but it didn't for `file.exists()`

Original answer:

setwd(<your path>)
(files <- list.files())
# [1] "račun 1.xlsx" "račun 2.xlsx" "račun 3.xlsx" "račun 4.xlsx" "račun 5.xlsx [6] "račun 6.xlsx"    
file.rename(files, paste0("novi_", seq_along(files, ".xlsx"))
# [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE

The fact that you specified a path in list.files() , suggests that you're not in the correct directory

Answer 2

One way to get around this is to use the 8.3 version of a filename , which is guaranteed to be ASCII-only. The main problem is that (as far as I know) there's no way to get this programmatically in R, so you should double-check that this is correct:

files <- paste0("RAUN~", 1:10, ".XLS")
newfiles <- paste0("novi_", 1:10, ".xlsx")
file.rename(files, newfiles)

You can get the 8.3 filenames with DIR /X from the commandline.