delete_empty_BA_files: Delete empty data and marker files

In einGlasRotwein/ForBioPsy: File Administration and Data Preprocessing for the BioPsy group

Description

Delete empty data and marker files

Usage

delete_empty_BA_files(filetype = c("txt", "csv", "dat"),
  folderpath = ".", header = TRUE, sep = "", skip = 0,
  row.names = NULL, only_truly_empty = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

filetype	A character vector specifying the file types that should be considered. Can be set to "txt", "dat" and/or "csv". Defaults to all of these types.
folderpath	The path of the folder you want to delete empty files in. If none is provided, the current working directory is searched.
header	Does the first non-skipped line contain a header? Defaults to TRUE.
sep	What is the separator in your files? Defaults to "".
skip	Indicate how many lines should be skipped in your files because the header e.g. starts in line 2. Be aware that you might have to run the function multiple times with different inputs when your data varies in structure and have a different amount of lines to skip. Defaults to 0.
row.names	Should row names be used? Defaults to NULL.
only_truly_empty	Logical. Indicates if only files that are truly empty (i.e. have a file size of 0 or are completely blank) should be deleted or if additionally, files that just contain column names (but no additional data) should be deleted as well. Defaults to FALSE.
...	Additional arguments passed to read.table(), which is called to check if files contain empty lines. Might lead to unexpected results.

Details

Originally, delete_empty_BA_files() is designed to clean up data exported from the Brain Vision Analyzer. In principle, however, it can be used to delete any empty .txt, .dat or .csv files in a given folder.

Sometimes, data exported from the Brain Vision Analyzer contains column names, but no actual data. By default, those are deleted as well, but you can restrict the deletion of files to those that are truly empty by setting only_truly_empty = TRUE. This will only delete files that either have a file size of 0 or are "blank", i.e. contain neither data nor a header or text. Note that the approach with only_truly_empty = TRUE relying on file size = 0 only really works for .txt files, because empty .csv and .dat files also have a small size. Instead, delete_empty_files() will try to open those files and if it encounters an error because they are empty, it will delete them. I cannot guarantee that this will lead to unexpected results at some point, but I'd always advise to backup your files before automatically and permanently deleting stuff anyways. Also note that of course, if you skip all the data with the skip argument and only empty lines follow afterwards, the file will be considered empty as well.

In some cases, your exported files contain additional information in the first line and column names only start in the following lines. You can skip lines that contain irrelevant information via the argument skip.

Examples without any example files aren't of much use here, so head to the example folder on GitHub to see the function in action.

Author(s)

Juliane Tkotz [e-mail]

einGlasRotwein/ForBioPsy documentation built on Nov. 4, 2019, 11:49 a.m.