Search code examples
rloopsdownloadfile-rename

R, rename thousands of downloaded files

I have a question which drives me crazy. I have the following tables as my source table:

v1 v2

1 http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/20/0000893220-01-000315.txt

2 http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/20/0000893220-03-000441.txt

3 http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/20/0000893220-04-000596.txt

4 http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/20/0000893220-05-000728.txt

5 http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/20/0000893220-06-000650.txt

.....

Basically, I have the ID in V1 and URL in V2. I need to download thousands of similar file at once. So far I solved the problem of downloading by using following code:(lets say link is the dataset containing the table I provide above)

urls<-c(link$v2)

for (url in urls){ download.file(url, destfile = basename(url), quiet=T) }

This code works fine for downloading. However, now, instead of keeping the name of the downloaded file as original basename such as 0000893220-01-000315.txt or 0000893220-03-000441.txt etc, I wish to change the file name according to the ID in v1, to name the file as 1.txt, 2.txt etc.

Can anyone help me to solve this? Very appreciated to your help :)

Solution

  • Use file.rename :

    with(link, file.rename(basename(v2), paste0(v1, ".txt")))

    Alternately, give them the name you want when you download them:

    nr <- nrow(link)
for(i in 1:nr) with(link[i,], download.file(v2, destfile = paste0(v1, ".txt"), quiet=TRUE))