R help - Jun 2009 - Reading 4-byte float into R from binary file

A simple question, I hope....  I have a binary file format that I want to
slurp into R using readBin.  There are a couple of fields in the file that
are 4-byte floats.  Since R has no "float" data type (4-byte), I am
wondering how to go about this task.  I could simply do all the work in C,
but the format is pretty simple, so I wanted to do it using just R.  I did
see as.single, but it appears that is for passing things to C and not much
more.  Any suggestions appreciated.

Thanks,
Sean

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On 6/24/2009 2:41 PM, Sean Davis wrote:
> A simple question, I hope....  I have a binary file format that I want to
> slurp into R using readBin.  There are a couple of fields in the file that
> are 4-byte floats.  Since R has no "float" data type (4-byte), I
am
> wondering how to go about this task.  I could simply do all the work in C,
> but the format is pretty simple, so I wanted to do it using just R.  I did
> see as.single, but it appears that is for passing things to C and not much
> more.  Any suggestions appreciated.
You can specify the size when reading a float using 
readBin(what="numeric", size=4).  It will read a single, then convert
it
to double to store in R.  You may need to set the endian value too, if 
the byte order is wrong.

Duncan Murdoch