read.xls - read in variable-length list of sheets, with their names

Question

Given several .xls files with varying number of sheets, I am reading them into R usingread.xls from the gdata package. I

Answer 1

For such tasks I use library XLConnect. With its functions you can get the names of each sheet in a vector and then just determine the length of that vector.

#Read your workbook 
wb<-loadWorkbook("Your_workbook.xls")

#Save each sheet's name as a vector
lp<-getSheets(wb)

#Now read each sheet as separate list element
dat<-lapply(seq_along(lp),function(i) readWorksheet(wb,sheet=lp[i]))

UPDATE

As suggested by @Martin Studer XLConnect functions are already vectorized, so there is no need to use lapply(), instead just provide vector of sheet names or use function getSheets() inside readWorksheet().

dat <- readWorksheet(wb, sheet = getSheets(wb))