Create empty text files in r and name them based on column values

Question

I'd like to create a folder of empty .txt files that correspond to values of the ID column. I plan to add details to these text files one by one over time. There are thousands of these IDs.

Here is an example:

IDs	People
124	Jim
345	Mary
675	Hilary
897	Chris
235	John.

I want the name of the text files to be 124.txt, 345.txt, 675.txt, etc and all saved in a folder that I can retrieve in R.

I tired to use the cat function cat(text, file = "myfile.txt") but I don't know how to automate the name of the files to be taken from the column values.

Answer 1

If your dataset is called dataset and if I understood it correctly, this should work:

filenames <- paste0(dataset$IDs, ".txt")

lapply(filenames, file.create)

Answer 2

One option would be to use a for loop:

dat <- data.frame(
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
  IDs = c(124L, 345L, 675L, 897L, 235L),
  People = c("Jim", "Mary", "Hilary", "Chris", "John.")
)

path <- tempdir()

for (id in dat$IDs) {
  text <- as.character(id)
  cat(text, file = file.path(path, paste0(id, ".txt")))
}

dir(path, "\\.txt")
#> [1] "124.txt" "235.txt" "345.txt" "675.txt" "897.txt"