How to Get Extension of a File in R

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To get the extension of a file in R, you can use the “file_ext()” method from the tools package.

library("tools")

Now, you can use the file_ext() method.

To check if the file exists in R, use the file.exists() method.

library(tools)

file <- "dataframe.R"

if (file.exists(file)) {

 file_ext(file)

} else {

 cat("The file does not exist")

}

Output

[1] "R"

You can see that first, we checked if the file exists, and if it does, we will get the extension of that file using the file_ext() method. Then, in the output, we can see that it returns R, the extension of the R programming file.

How to get a filename without extension in R

To get the filename without extension in R, use the “file_path_sans_ext()” method. Unfortunately, the file_path_sans_ext() method is not a built-in R method. 

library(tools)

file <- "dataframe.R"

if (file.exists(file)) {

 file_path_sans_ext(file)

} else {

 cat("The file does not exist")

}

Output

[1] "dataframe"

You can also use the basename() function to remove the path leading to the file, and with this regex, any extension will be removed.

library(tools)

file <- "dataframe.R"

if (file.exists(file)) {

 sub(pattern = "(.*)\\..*$", replacement = "\\1", basename(file))

} else {

 cat("The file does not exist")

}

Output

[1] "dataframe"

That is it.

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