pathformatr

Installation 

devtools::install_github("mcguinlu/pathformatr")
library(pathformatr)

Functionality

The purpose of pathformatr is singular and simple - to allow you to use the RStudio file path auto-complete functionality in here() and file.path() calls and then quickly reformat the resulting file path to use quoted, comma-separated elements:

here::here("data/2020/06/01/data.csv")
# or
here::here("data\2020\06\01\data.csv")

# becomes

here::here("data", "2020", "06", "01", "data.csv")

This functionality is available via the format_path() function, but is designed to work best via an RStudio AddIn - simply highlight your entire function call (i.e. “here(” to “)” inclusive)[1], browse to the pathformatr section in the RStudio Addins drop-down menu, and select “Split file path into quoted and comma-separated elements.”.

Alternatively you can bind the functionality to a keyboard shortcut (I personally like mapping it to CRTL+/).

A second helper function (format_all_paths()) formats all here() and file.path() calls in the active file, while also allowing users to define additional function calls to target using the fns argument.

# Open the document in RStudio and then run the following from the console
format_all_paths()

# To only target here() calls
format_all_paths(fns = c("here"))

# To only target file.path() calls
format_all_paths(fns = c("file.path"))

Motivation

My primary motivation for this project was to make it as easy as possible to use the here::here() workflow (the benefits of which are laid out in a README by @jennybc). This package/AddIn was created to address my sole issue with here(), in that its a pain to format auto-completed file paths by manually going from a slash-separated string to quoted, comma-separated elements.

In addition, this project presented a good opportunity to explore three topics I was keen to expand my knowledge of:

  • the RStudio interface (accessed via the rstudioapi package), in particular developing tests for functions that modify user-highlighted text/the active file;
  • building RStudio AddIns; and
  • regex syntax, particularly around the handling of slashes (“\” and “/”).

[1] This is to prevent users (mainly me) from reformatting paths in functions that do not support separator-agnostic file paths.