Easy error handling in R with purrr’s possibly

It’s discouraging to see your code choke section of the way by way of though making an attempt to use a operate in R. You may know that anything in a person of these objects triggered a challenge, but how do you observe down the offender?

The purrr package’s potentially() operate is a person uncomplicated way.

In this case in point, I’ll demo code that imports many CSV data files. Most files’ price columns import as people, but a person of these comes in as figures. Jogging a operate that expects people as enter will induce an mistake.

For setup, the code underneath masses a number of libraries I need to have and then utilizes base R’s list.data files() operate to return a sorted vector with names of all the data files in my information listing. 

library(purrr)
library(readr)
library(rio)
library(dplyr)
my_information_data files <- list.files("data_files", full.names = TRUE) %>%
type()

I can then import the to start with file and search at its structure. 

x <- rio::import("data_files/file1.csv")
str(x)
'data.frame':	3 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ Category     : chr  "A" "B" "C"
 $ Value        : chr  "$4,256.48 " "$438.22" "$945.12"
 $ MonthStarting: chr  "12/1/20" "12/1/20" "12/1/20"

Both of those the Worth and Month columns are importing as character strings. What I in the long run want is Worth as figures and MonthStarting as dates.