[R] Absolute path in gdata library

[Riccardo Romoli]

I was completely ignoring both path.expand() and normalizePath()... My
solution were a little more complicated. I write some 'if else' to
check which computer I'm using now and 'adjust' the right path...

Thanks for your precious suggestion!!! I will try to use
normalizePath() to semplificate my code!!

Best

Riccardo

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 7:57 AM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 07/11/2012 23:12, Marc Schwartz wrote:
>>
>> On Nov 7, 2012, at 4:58 PM, r <ric.romoli at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear list, I have some .xls files that I need to read into R. I am
>>> able to do so using read.xls in the gdata package, however the
>>> helper functions sheetNames and sheetCount fail. This is the
>>> error:
>>>
>>> Unable to open file '~/SharedFolder/MyData/mydata.xls'. Warning:
>>> running command ''/usr/bin/perl'
>>> '/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/gdata/perl/sheetCount.pl'
>>> '~/SharedFolder/MyData/mydata.xls'' had status 2
>>>
>>> Googling I found that the problem is caused by the use of the
>>> absolute path ("~/SharedFolder/MyData/") instead of
>>> "/home/r/SharedFolder/MyData/". I use the absolute path because I
>>> work from different computer connected to a shared folder.
>
>
>>>
>>> This is the discussion I found:
>>>
>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11737906/path-specification-when-using-the-r-package-gdata
>>>
>>>
>>>
> Is there a way to solve this problem??
>>>
>>>
>>> Best Riccardo
>>
>>
>>
>> You can contact the package maintainer (cc'd here) and suggest that
>> the use of:
>>
>> normalizePath()
>>
>> be implemented in the code, which would then do tilde expansion, etc.
>> when relative file paths are passed rather than absolute paths are
>> used.
>
>
> If you just want tilde expansion, it is usually better to use path.expand().
>
> normalizePath() is more drastic and can lead to paths the user will not
> recognize on file systems with complex use of links.
>
> R itself uses normalizePath() only where it needs to work hard to check that
> paths are the same.  One instance is .libPaths() (and it has led to
> puzzlement there).
>
>>
>> A workaround for now, would be to wrap your filename in that function
>> in your code, so that when you use relative paths, the appropriate
>> expansion is used and passed to the gdata function as the filename
>> argument.
>>
>> I just made this change myself in the WriteXLS package at the request
>> of another useR.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Marc Schwartz
>>
>> ______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org
>> mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do
>> read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>
> --
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595