Naming files

Working in R and RStudio

Athanasia Mo Mowinckel

Names matter

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

This

is

not

true

for

file

names.

From Danielle Navarro’s Project Structure slides

https://slides.djnavarro.net/

Names matter


machine readable


human readable


sort nicely

What features differentiate 😔 vs 😍?


😔



😍

myabstract.docx

Joe’s Filenames Use Spaces and Punctuation.xlsx

figure 1.png

homework1.R

JW7d^(2sl@deletethisandyourcareerisoverWx2*.txt


2018-01_bryan-abstract-rstudio-conf.docx

joes-filenames-are-getting-better.xlsx

fig01_scatterplot-talk-length-vs-interest.png

bryan_hw01.R

1986-01-28_raw-data-from-challenger-o-rings.txt

02:00

Names machines like

  1. don’t leave white space
  1. use letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores… that’s it
    (characters like ^.*?+|$ can have a special meaning)
  1. be consistent with case
    (some operating systems treat a and A the same, some differently).
  1. use separator characters wisely

    use underscore _ to separate different chunks

    use hyphen - for words in the same chunk


This creates names that are regular expression and globbing friendly, and easy to compute on! 🎉

Adapted from
https://djnavarro.net/slides-project-structure/#1.

Names humans like


name contains info on content

name anticipates context

concept of a slug 🐌 from user-friendly URLs

  • 1986-01-28_raw-data-from-challenger-o-rings.txt

  • concise, meaningful description

  • usually appended to the end

Names that sort nicely


put something numeric in there

left pad with zeros for constant width, nice sorting, 01

use the ISO 8601 standard for dates, YYYY-MM-DD

order = chronological or … consider common sense

ISO 8601

YYYY-MM-DD

ISO 8601

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

https://twitter.com/JennyBryan/status/816143967695687684

👍 file names

Anyone can guess at file’s purpose

👍 file names

Easy to filter in R (or the shell or whatever)

👍 file names

Intentional delimiters means meta-data is easily recovered.

_ delimits fields; - delimits words

👍 file names

Sorts in the same order as you
experience in real life.

Names matter


machine readable, human readable, and sort nicely


easy to implement NOW


payoffs accumulate as your skills evolve and
projects get more complex