Hello,
If you need to go through R the function fread of data.table can speed up the data import. If not and you work on a gnu/linux distro may be awk might help https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5536018/how-to-print-matched-regex-pattern-using-awk HTH, Jeremie ______________________________________________ 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.