tkWidgets: fileBrowser – R documentation

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fileBrowser

Simple Interface to View and Pick Files

Description

This function provides the widget for users to go up and down a path and view the files. When files are selected and the "End" button is pressed, the function returns a vector of character strings with the full paths of the selected files.

Usage

fileBrowser(path="", testFun = function(x) TRUE, prefix = NULL,
	    suffix = NULL, textToShow = "Select file(s)",
	    nSelect = -1)

Arguments

`path`	character string for the full path to be view. Defaults to the current working directory if no path is provided.
`testFun`	function that checks to see if a given file name satisfies predefined requirements. The default is no checking.
`prefix`	character string for a prefix used to screen out file names that do not have that prefix as part of their names.
`suffix`	character string for a suffix used to screen out file names that do not have that suffix as part of their names.
`textToShow`	character string to be shown on the widget to given instructions to users.
`nSelect`	integer indicating the number of files that should be selected. No limitation if `nSelect = -1` as per default.

Details

When a path is viewed, files will be displayed as they are and directories will be displayed with a system file separator appended (e.g. "/" for Unix systems). Single click on a file name will make the file selectable when the select button is pressed. Multiple selection is possible by dragging with mouse button 1 pressed. Double click on a directory name will go into that directory and display its files. When a file/directory is selected and the "End" button pressed, the full path for the selected files selected will be returned.

The widget is modal and has to be closed by pressing the "End" button before doing any other operations. Functions, prefix, and suffix can be specified. Examples of validity functions are hasPrefix and hasSuffix.

The following is a list of the buttons and their associated behavior:

Up: Moves the directory whose content is to be displayed in the box for file names one level up along the directory tree. No action if already on top of the tree.
Select \>\>: When a file or files in the box for file names in a directory have been highlighted by clicking or dragging mouse button 1 and this button is pushed, the highlighted file(s) will be displayed in the box for selected file(s) on the right.
\<\< Remove: When a file or files in the box for selected files have been highlighted by clicking or dragging this button is pushed, the highlighted file(s) will be removed from the box.
Clear: Clears everything in the box for selected files when pushed.
end: Returns a vector containing all the names in the box for selected files or NULL if the box is empty. The full path will be appended to the file names.

Value

A vector of character strings containing the full path of each file selected.

Author(s)

Jianhua (John) Zhang

Examples

## The example here is only run interactively since it requires user
## interference which may cause problems if not available:
if(interactive()) {

  # Call the function to view the current directory
  flist <- fileBrowser()
  flist

  # To call the function with a path do
  # fileBrowser(path = "yourPath")
}

tkWidgets

R based tk widgets

v1.68.0

Artistic-2.0

Authors

J. Zhang <jzhang@jimmy.harvard.edu>

Initial release