readLines is doing exactly what you are asking:
Value
A character vector of length the number of lines read.
You still have to convert the character strings to numeric. Exactly
how large is "quite large"? What system are you running on? How much
memory do you have? What is the error message that you are getting?
Exactly what does your file look like? Have you tried reading in
portions of the file? How big will it be if you could read it in?
Will it take up more than 25% of real memory? There is still some
information you need to provide so an assessment can be made.
On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Dongyan Song <yzhskdls at hotmail.com>
wrote:>
> Dear all,
>
> I read a file with all numbers with readLines function, as below,
>> f <- file("data.txt")
>> a <- readLines(f)
> but all the values in a are in format "....", and I cannot do the
> calculation with them since they are not numeric. I wonder how should I
skip
> those quotes, thank you for help!
> I have to use readLines function instead of scan, read.table or matrix,
> because the size of file is quite large, and other function cannot allocate
> enough space/memory to read the input file.
>
> Best,
> Dongyan
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--
Jim Holtman
Cincinnati, OH
+1 513 646 9390
What is the problem that you are trying to solve?