trouble specifying colmuns to read

[Kirk Wythers]

I am trying to extract a particular block of data from an excel work book. So far I have gotten the basic form of read.xlsx to work and can specify startRow and endRow. However, I am struggling to get the readColumn functionality working. 

I can see how the example apporaches the prob by reading into "file", loading the workbook into "wb", then spcifiying which sheet with "sheets" and "sheet". However I can not seem to the first line"

file <- system.file("path_to_folder", "excel_file.xls", package = "xlsx")

to work properly. On my machine the command runs with out an error, but only placed two " into the object "file"

I end up with 

> file

[1] "" 

which is an empty object. The next command 

wb <- loadWorkbook(file)

throws an error "Error in loadWorkbook(file) : Cannot find"

which makes sense, since there is noting in the object "file" 

Any suggestings would be much appreciated.

[Adrian Dragulescu]

Kirk, 

The file is the actual path to your file on the disk, e.g.  file <- "C:/temp/myfile.xlsx" on a Windows system. 

Best, 

Adrian

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[Kirk Wythers]

Thanks for the reply Adrian. Can you clarify the three arguments then in the example:

file <- system.file("tests", "test_import.xlsx", package = "xlsx"), I guess I'm uncear as to what system.file() does in this case. 

if my file is located in: 

~/projects/south_watetershead.xls

Should the command simply be:

file <- system.file("~/projects/shouth_watershead.xls") 

However, I tried that and still get an empty object  "'  

Again, thanks for your work on this package, and thank you for the extra advice.

Best,

Kirk

[Adrian Dragulescu]

Kirk, 

On Linux, you should use the full path, don't assume that the ~ will expand. 

wb <- loadWorkbook("/home/kirk/watershed.xls")

and continue from there. 

Adrian

PS. Specifying your sessionInfo() helps me doing less guessing.

system.file is only useful to find files "inside" a package -- good for testing, but it's not your use case.  Your file is not inside the xlsx package folder.