Using R to list all files with a specified extension

Question

I'm very new to R and am working on updating an R script to iterate through a series of .dbf tables created using ArcGIS and produce a series of graphs.

I have a directory, C:Scratch, that will contain all of my .dbf files. However, when ArcGIS creates these tables, it also includes a .dbf.xml file. I want to remove these .dbf.xml files from my file list and thus my iteration. I've tried searching and experimenting with regular expressions to no avail. This is the basic expression I'm using (Excluding all of the various experimentation):

files <- list.files(pattern = "dbf")

Can anyone give me some direction?

Answer 1

files <- list.files(pattern = "\.dbf$")

$ at the end means that this is end of string. "dbf$" will work too, but adding \. (. is special character in regular expressions so you need to escape it) ensure that you match only files with extension .dbf (in case you have e.g. .adbf files).