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chapter7_01_filenames.md

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EC Theme Lesson 1
File Names

Three principles for (file) names:

  • Machine readable
  • Human readable
  • Plays well with default ordering

Machine readable

  • Regular expression and globbing friendly
  • Avoid spaces, punctuation, accented characters, case sensitivity
  • Easy to compute on
  • Deliberate use of delimiters

Machine readable Motivation

  • Easy to search for files later

  • Easy to narrow file lists based on names

  • Easy to extract info from file names, e.g. by splitting

  • New to regular expressions and globbing? be kind to yourself and avoid

    • Spaces in file names
    • Punctuation
    • Accented characters
    • Different files named foo and Foo

Human readable

  • Name contains info on content

  • Connects to concept of a slug from semantic URLs

Embrace the slug

Examples of names

01_marshal-data.r
helper01_load-counts.r

Human readable Motivation

Easy to figure out what a file is, based on its name

Plays well with default ordering

  • Put something numeric first

  • Use the ISO 8601 standard for dates

  • Left pad other numbers with zeros

Examples

Chronological order

Logical order

Dates

Left pad other numbers with zeros

If you don’t left pad, you get this:

10_final-figs-for-publication.R
1_data-cleaning.R
2_fit-model.R

Examples of Good and Bad Names

BIG NO

myabstract.docx
Joe’s Filenames Use Spaces and Punctuation.xlsx
figure 1.png
fig 2.png
JW7d^(2sl@deletethisandyourcareerisoverWx2*.txt

YES

2014-06-08_abstract-for-sla.docx
joes-filenames-are-getting-better.xlsx
fig01_scatterplot-talk-length-vs-interest.png
fig02_histogram-talk-attendance.png
1986-01-28_raw-data-from-challenger-o-rings.txt

Source Data Carpentry

Let's Practice!