Barry's solution works with Windows without cygwin. You do need Rtools, available from the Windows page on CRAN
Rtools does not have "gunzip", but that is just an abbreviation for "gzip -d". x:\HOME\rmh\HH-R.package>path path PATH=c:\Progra~2\Rtools\bin;c:\Progra~2\Rtools\gcc-4.6.3\bin;c:\progra~1\R\R-3.2.3\bin\x64;c:\Progra~1\MikTeX~1.9\miktex\bin\x64;c:\windows;c:\windows\system32 x:\HOME\rmh\HH-R.package>gzip -d -c c:\Users\rmh.DESKTOP-60G4CCO\test.RData | strings -t d gzip -d -c c:\Users\rmh.DESKTOP-60G4CCO\test.RData | strings -t d 0 RDX2 35 mydataframe 230 names 251 mylongnamehere 273 anotherlongname 314 aasdkjhasdkjhaskdj 347 row.names 389 class 410 data.frame On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote: > You *might* be able to get them from the raw file... > > First, I don't quite know what "colnames" of an .RData file means. > "colnames" are the column names of a matrix (or data frame), so I'll > assume your .RData file contains exactly one data frame and you want > to column names of it. > > So let's create one of those: > > > mydataframe = data.frame(mylongnamehere=runif(3), > anotherlongname=runif(3), z=runif(3), y=runif(3), > aasdkjhasdkjhaskdj=runif(3)) > save(mydataframe, file="./test.RData") > > Now I'm going to use some Unix utilities to see if there's any > identifiable strings in the file. .RData files are by default > compressed using `gzip`, so I'll `gunzip` them and pipe it into > `strings`: > > $ gunzip -c test.RData | strings -t d > 0 RDX2 > 35 mydataframe > 230 names > 251 mylongnamehere > 273 anotherlongname > 314 aasdkjhasdkjhaskdj > 347 row.names > 389 class > 410 data.frame > > > - thats found the object name (mydataframe) and most of the column > names except the short ones, which are too short for `strings` to > recognise. But if your names are long enough (4 or more chars, I > think) they'll show up. > > Of course you'll have to filter them out from all the other string > output, but they should all appear shortly after the word "names", > since the colnames of a data frame are the "names" attribute of the > data. > > If you don't have a Unix or Mac machine handy you can get these > utilities on Windows via Cygwin but that's another story... > > Barry > > > > > > > > > On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 3:59 PM, Lida Zeighami <lid.z...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi, >> I have a huge .RData file and I need just to get the colnames of it. so is >> there any way to reach the column names without loading or reading the >> whole file? >> Since the file is so big and I need to repeat this process several times, >> so it takes so long to load the file first and then take the colnames! >> >> Thanks >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >> 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. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > 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. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.