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Classify a downloaded .txt file from its content

Source: R/data_check_helpers.R
txt_classify_content.Rd

A .txt extension says nothing about what a file holds: research repositories ship experiment data (E-Prime exports, Ibex/task logs), codebooks, and plain prose notes all as .txt. The name-based classifier (data_classify_files()) runs on remote file names before download, so it cannot tell these apart and settles on a conservative guess. Once the file is on disk, its content can. This is the same fetch-then-reclassify pattern the module already uses for zips.

Usage

txt_classify_content(path)

Arguments

path

path to a local .txt file.

Value

a single data_check type, or NA_character_ when undecided.

Details

Returns the data_check type the content implies:

  • "data" for an E-Prime export (its fixed *** Header Start *** / LevelName: header), or for a delimited table with a real header row;

  • NA_character_ when the content is not recognised, meaning "keep whatever the name-based classifier decided" – never a downgrade on a guess.

The file is only read, never modified or removed: the download cache is persistent by design (see repo_cache_dir()), so classification decides how a file is used, not whether it survives.

Examples

txt <- tempfile(fileext = ".txt")
writeLines(c("id  rt  condition", "1  512  congruent", "2  640  incongruent",
             "3  498  congruent"), txt)
txt_classify_content(txt)
#> [1] "data"