How to read multiple ASCII files in R

Question

I'm trying to read multiple .asc files in R so I can perform some analyses later on them. I'm using this code:

library(raster)
list_file <- list.files ("C:\\Users\\Areej\\Documents\\Gibbon_bangladesh\\Bangladesh_Env_Vs_30s_ascii_R\\",
 pattern ".asc", full.names = T) 
gibbon <- stack(file_list)
gibbon

but it shows me unexpected token for the ".asc" part in the code

Answer 1

This is more of an R question than a ascii or even {raster} issue.
You wrote a badly defined pattern just as the error message responded.
You should have checked that you got a vector of filenames as a result for the second line of code. This code should fix the pattern issue:

library(raster)
list_file <- list.files ("C:\\Users\\Areej\\Documents\\Gibbon_bangladesh\\Bangladesh_Env_Vs_30s_ascii_R\\",
 pattern = "*.asc", full.names = T) 
gibbon <- stack(file_list)
gibbon

Note that you were missing a star (*) so the pattern will include all files with the .asc extension.

You can also use this pattern to be certain that the file ends with .asc:

pattern = "\\.asc$"