The goal of multiread is to wrap the process of reading in multiple csv files into R, and work with them in either list or dataframe format
Most people are accustomed to the process that follows
myfiles <- list.files(pattern = ".csv")
mydata <- lapply(myfiles, read.csv)
do.call(rbind, mydata)Rather than overload beginners with concepts like lapply and do.call, which can be confusing at first, multiread simplifies this process by providing functions that wrap this process, and can optionally add an identifier column to each dataframe that shows the filename that it came from. If the list is later converted to a dataframe, this addition of an id column becomes invaluable.
Under multiread, the above code is replaced with
library(multiread)
myfiles <- list.files(pattern = ".csv")
mydata <- multiread(myfiles, as_df = TRUE)Alternatively, if you would rather leave your dataframes in list format, simply use
my_data <- multiread(myfiles, as_df = FALSE)Later, if you want to convert them to a dataframe, you can use convert_df
my_data <- convert_df(my_data)