[R] data.frame building

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Jean Eid wrote:

> I have two seperate questions that both deal with the way R handels data
> sets:
> 
> First, I am trying to read a data set of 80M into R. I am using
> read.table(). The file is a tab file and I have tested the function for a
> small amount of lines. It seems to work fine (i.e. correct amount of columns
> and rows). However, when I try to read the full data set, R outputs a memory
> limit error and stops responding to any command even the gc()  and the
> quit() commands. It says it reached maximum memory of 489MB (that is the
> amount of RAM I have). I tried the to increase vsize and nsize but no luck.

Have you read and used the hints in help(read.table) and the R Data
Import/Export Manual?  Alternatively, use scan() (as hinted there).

-- 
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