[R] reading and analyzing a text file

DAVID ARTETA GARCIA
2008-05-16T14:30:34Z

Dear list,

I have a text file from a scanner that includes 20 lines of text
(scanner settings) before it actually starts showing the readings in a
tabular format (headings are ID, intensity, background and few others).

I am a biologist with some experience using R and my question is if it
is possible to read this file into an R workspace and store the actual
readings in a dataframe, avoiding the text at the begining. It seems
to me that this is not the actual purpose of R, but maybe someone can
point me to a method for doing this. Do I need to parse the file with
some other programming language? is it possible to link, say, Perl or
C++ with R to automate the reading and the analysis of such files? The
aim is to be able to automate this analysis since these files are our
routine experimental output.

Thanks for your help,

D.