Quick Read and Merge with Data.Table's Fread and Rbindlist

Question

I am looking for a way to quickly read and merge a bunch of data files using data.table\'s fread and rbindlist functions. I think if fread could take a vector of files names

Answer 1

You could do datatablelist = lapply(list.files("my/data/directory/"), fread) and then rbind the resulting list of data frames.

Although lapply is cleaner than an explicit loop, your loop will work if you read the files directly into a list.

datatablelist = list()

for(i in 1:length(datafiles)){
  datatablelist[[datafiles[i]]] = fread(datafiles[i])
}