[Rd] R Bug: write.table for matrix of more than 2, 147, 483, 648 elements

[Tousey, Colton]

Hello,

I want to report a bug in R that is limiting my capabilities to export a matrix with write.csv or write.table with over 2,147,483,648 elements (C's int limit). I found this bug already reported about before: https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17182. However, there appears to be no solution or fixes in upcoming R version releases.

The error message is coming from the writetable part of the utils package in the io.c source code(https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/utils/src/io.c):
/* quick integrity check */
                if(XLENGTH(x) != (R_len_t)nr * nc)
                    error(_("corrupt matrix -- dims not not match length"));

The issue is that nr*nc is an integer and the size of my matrix, 2.8 billion elements, exceeds C's limit, so the check forces the code to fail.

My version:
> R.Version()
$platform
[1] "x86_64-w64-mingw32"

$arch
[1] "x86_64"

$os
[1] "mingw32"

$system
[1] "x86_64, mingw32"

$status
[1] ""

$major
[1] "3"

$minor
[1] "4.3"

$year
[1] "2017"

$month
[1] "11"

$day
[1] "30"

$`svn rev`
[1] "73796"

$language
[1] "R"

$version.string
[1] "R version 3.4.3 (2017-11-30)"

$nickname
[1] "Kite-Eating Tree"

Thank you,
Colton


Colton Tousey
Research Associate II
P: 816.585.0300   E: colton.tousey at kc.frb.org
FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF KANSAS CITY
1 Memorial Drive   *   Kansas City, Missouri 64198   *   www.kansascityfed.org

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