Safely read a data file with consistent output — safe_read

Reads a data file using a user-supplied reader function, returning a tibble along with any error message encountered during import. This is useful when batch-reading many files where some may be malformed or inconsistent.

Usage

safe_read_data(
  file,
  reader,
  cols = NULL,
  sheet = NULL,
  sheet_pattern = NULL,
  anti_sheet_pattern = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

file: Character string. Path to the file to be read.
reader: Function used to read the file (e.g., readr::read_csv, readxl::read_excel). The function must take file as its first argument.
cols: Optional character vector of column names to enforce in the output. Missing columns will be added and filled with NA, and extra columns will be dropped.
sheet: The sheet to be selected if static name. If not NULL, only the explicitly specified sheet will be read for all files.
sheet_pattern: Optional regex pattern to select the sheet by name. If not NULL, all sheets matching the pattern will be attempted to be read.
anti_sheet_pattern: Character or NULL. Regex pattern to exclude sheets (Excel only)
...: Additional arguments passed directly to reader().

Value

A named list with the following elements:

data: A tibble containing the imported data, or NULL if an error occurred.
error: NULL if the file was read successfully; otherwise, a character string containing the error message.
file: The input file path.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
files <- c("data/a.csv", "data/b.csv")

results <- lapply(
  files,
  safe_read_data,
  reader = readr::read_csv,
  cols = c("id", "value", "date")
)

# Extract successfully read data
good_data <- purrr::keep(results, ~ is.null(.x$error))
} # }