Question

Part of my project directory structure looks like:

\projects\project\main.R
\projects\project\src

where \src contains a bunch of 1-function-per-file, project-specific functions.

Q: What’s the best practice way to add these functions to the working directory projects\project?

There are a few solutions I see:

1. attach("./src"). I’m trying to avoid this because (1) the Google Styleguide recommends avoiding the use of attach() and (2) I receive the

   Warning messages:
   

   1: Reading Unix style database directory (./tmp) from Splus on Windows: may
have problems finding some datasets, especially those whose names
differ only by case (file tmp-script1.ssc should not have been made by
Splus on Windows) in: exists(name, where = db)
   when doing this.

2. lapply(paste("./src/",list.files("./src/"),sep=""),source). This works perfectly fine, it just seems clunky. There has to be a better way, right?

3. Refer to my functions by their full name ./src/myfunc. This will get ugly very quick. I’m sure there’s a better way.

4. Get rid of the ./src part of my directory and just throw all the functions in the main working directory. The problem with this is that I’d prefer to keep with a directory structure that is close to that of John Myles White’s ProjectTemplate

5. Throw all the functions in one file, ./src/func.R and source that. I guess this approach avoids the ugliness of “2.” above, but I’d really like to have one function per file. Just seems cleaner that way.

Answer 1

Try

lapply(list.files("src", full.names = TRUE), source)

EDIT

or

lapply(Sys.glob("src/*"), source)