File Organization: Naming

Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 10 min

Questions

• What are the common file organization errors?

• What are best practices for file organization?

Objectives

• Highlight common SNAFUs

• Learn to employ unit testing

Names matter

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

Three principles for (file) names:

1. Machine readable
2. Human readable
3. Plays well with default ordering

### Awesome file names :)

### Machine readable

Machine readable

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

#### Globbing

Except of complete file listing:

Example of globbing to narrow file listing:

Same using Mac OS Finder search facilities:

Same using regex in R:

#### Punctuation

Deliberate use of “-“ and “_” allows recovery of meta-data from the filenames:

• “_” underscore used to delimit units of meta-data I want later.
• ”-“ hyphen used to delimit words so my eyes don’t bleed.

This happens to be R but also possible in the shell, Python, etc.

### Recap: machine readable

• 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

Human readable

• Name contains info on content
• Connects to concept of a slug from semantic URLs

#### Example

Which set of file(name)s do you want at 3 a.m. before a deadline?

#### Embrace the slug

#### Recap: Human readable

Easy to figure out what the heck something is, based on its name

Plays well with default ordering

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: Put something numeric first

Dates: Use the ISO 8601 standard for dates: YYYY-MM-DD

From twitter

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

which is just sad :(

#### Recap: Plays well with default ordering

• Put something numeric first
• Use the ISO 8601 standard for dates
• Left pad other numbers with zeros

Recap

#### Three principles for (file) names

1. Machine readable
2. Human readable
3. Plays well with default ordering

Pros

• Easy to implement NOW
• Payoffs accumulate as your skills evolve and projects get more complex.

Go forth and use awesome file names :)

Key Points

• File organization is important.