File paths and reading in data

Hopefully you have followed the advice here and organized your RStudio files into folders like this:

And so, for example, when you go inside your Lecture 2 folder, it looks like this:

This is great for organization, but it causes a small problem. A command like this may not work:

library(tidyverse)

flint <- read_csv("flint.csv")

Why not? Because the file flint.csv is inside one of your handy dandy folders, but you have not told read_csv which folder, and so it cannot find it. To fix this, change the code to this:

flint <- read_csv("~/lecture-2/flint.csv")

The string "~/lecture-2/flint.csv" is called a file path and it tells the function read_csv the path of folders it has to search down in order to find the file flint.csv. If you have chosen to give your folders slightly different names like Lecture 2 or Lecture-2 or lecture 2 or john-sucks, that’s fine. Just make sure you make the appropriate change when you run the command. So flint <- read_csv("~/Lecture 2/flint.csv") or flint <- read_csv("~/john-sucks/flint.csv") , etc.