Hei David, Thanks for your quick response, but unfortunately n and nmax alone don't do the job. If I want to read items no. 100001 to 200000, the n=100000 option will work, but skip=100000 (to NOT read the first 100000 items) won't.
Or with your example, scan(textConnection('1 2 3 4 5 6 7'), skip=3) will never work, while scan(textConnection('1 2 3 4 \n 5 \n 6 \n 7'), skip=3) will. But I don't have line breaks in my file. Is there no way to specify the character for a line break in scan / read.table / etc.? Kind regards, Susanne -----Opprinnelig melding----- Fra: David Winsemius [mailto:dwinsem...@comcast.net] Sendt: 27. februar 2010 17:38 Til: Balzer Susanne Kopi: 'r-help@r-project.org' Emne: Re: [R] scan and skip - without line breaks in the input file On Feb 27, 2010, at 11:24 AM, Balzer Susanne wrote: > Dear all, > > I am trying to read in big amounts of data with scan. It's only one > variable, numeric values, separated by tabs,.. and it's many of > them. So I was thinking that I could use the skip option and read in > 100000 values at a time - but skip doesn't work, probably because I > don't have line breaks in the txt file. So any value specified for > skip makes the scan function jump to the end of the file. ?scan Without a working example it is hard to be sure, but it appears from a rapid look at the help page that nmax is the argument you want. > scan(textConnection('1 2 3 4 5 6 7'), nmax=4) Read 4 items [1] 1 2 3 4 (Ignores line-feeds) > scan(textConnection('1 2 \n 3 4 5 6 7'), nmax=4) Read 4 items [1] 1 2 3 4 -- David. > > Does anyone have a good idea? I would be extremely grateful. > > Kind regards, > > Susanne Balzer > > > > **************************** > Susanne Balzer > PhD Student > Institute of Marine Research > N-5073 Bergen, Norway > Phone: +47 55 23 69 45 > susanne.bal...@imr.no > www.imr.no > > ______________________________________________ > 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. David Winsemius, MD Heritage Laboratories West Hartford, CT ______________________________________________ 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.