Dear R users, I am trying to read a text file into R. the text file looks as shown below (data1). I want to skip the text lines and collect all lines starting with specific marker(s). Example in below, I want to collect all lines which start with -1000 and -1001 If the model results in successful convergence, each run will result in 6 lines per table. I was trying to read the 3rd and 4th line from every block of 6 lines using the following. ################# n=2 # example only first 2 runs patt2=NULL for(ser1 in unique(1:n)) { patt1 = c(6*ser1-3, 6*ser1-2) patt2=c(patt2,patt1) } see1= read.delim("data1.txt", header=F) see2 =as.character(see1[,1]) see3 = see2[patt2] writeLines(see3, "see3") see4 = read.table("see3", header=T, sep='') see4 V1 V2 V3 V4 1 -1000 2.0 2.0 2.0 2 -1001 0.5 0.5 0.5 3 -1000 2.0 2.0 5.2 4 -1001 0.4 0.4 0.5 ###################### But then when convergence fails there are only 4 lines generated (see table 3) for that run. In the model with 1000 or more runs, we don’t know which run will fail to converge. Hence using the pattern of 6 line blocks doesn’t work. Is there a way to directly just read all the lines starting with -1000 and -1001 ? Thank you for your time ##data1 table:1 conditional estimation iteration par1 par2 par3 -1000 2 2 2 -1001 0.5 0.5 0.5 -1002 0 0 0 -1003 0 0 0 table:2 conditional estimation iteration par1 par2 par3 -1000 2 2 5.2 -1001 0.4 0.4 0.5 -1002 0 0 0 -1003 0 0 0 table:3 conditional estimation iteration par1 par2 par3 -1000 3.1 2.2 4.2 -1001 0.5 0.5 0.5 table:4 conditional estimation iteration par1 par2 par3 -1000 2 1.2 2 -1001 0.5 0.4 0.5 -1002 0 0 0 -1003 0 0 0 ################## -- Navin Goyal [[alternative HTML version deleted]]