> Are there any tricks or wise suggestions on how to import > huge comma separated files into R? We have used the ordinary > "read syntax" but it takes forever....
One potential time- and memory saver is to specify the class of each column using colClasses in read.table. For a large data set (800 000 rows) on Windows I also found it quicker and more reliable to import the data into a MySQL database and then use ODBC to read the data into R than to use read.table on the raw data - but that was in part because I hada bit of trouble with the file encoding and MySQL/ODBC sidestepped the issue. S Ellison ******************************************************************* This email and any attachments are confidential. Any use...{{dropped:8}} ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.