[R] Reading fixed format file

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

What do you want to do with it once you have read it in?  There is no 
point in reading in a matrix that is likely to take up all of the
available memory (160Mb if numeric) ....

Possible suggestions are to load it into a database and access in blocks
of rows or columns, or spend a small amount of money on another 1Gb of
memory and write C code in a package to read the file.

On Sat, 1 Feb 2003 TyagiAnupam at aol.com wrote:

> I am looking for suggestions to read a large fixed-column format file and 
> create a data-frame with about 50,000 observations and 400 variables, each 
> variable in 2--5 colums. This is on a machine with 128 Mb of RAM with R on 
> Linux or MS-win. I will also be thankful for any other suggestions about 
> working with data of this size.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595