Given several .xls
files with varying number of sheets, I am reading them into R
usingread.xls
from the gdata
package. I
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]))
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))
See the sheetCount and sheetNames
functions (on same help page) in gdata. If xls <- "a.xls"
, say, then reading all sheets of a spreadsheet into a list, one sheet per component, is just this:
sapply(sheetNames(xls), read.xls, xls = xls, simplify = FALSE)
Note that the components will be named using the names of the sheets. Depending on the content it might make sense to remove simplify = FALSE
.