You could try it with sqldf and see if that is any faster. It use RSQLite/sqlite to read the data into a database without going through R and from there it reads all or a portion as specified into R. It requires two lines of code of the form:
f < file("myfile.dat") DF <- sqldf("select * from f", dbname = tempfile()) with appropriate modification to specify the format of your file and possibly to indicate a portion only. See example 6 on the sqldf home page: http://sqldf.googlecode.com and ?sqldf On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Rob Steele <freenx.10.robste...@xoxy.net> wrote: > I'm finding that readLines() and read.fwf() take nearly two hours to > work through a 3.5 GB file, even when reading in large (100 MB) chunks. > The unix command wc by contrast processes the same file in three > minutes. Is there a faster way to read files in R? > > Thanks! > > ______________________________________________ > 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. > ______________________________________________ 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.