[R] Non-standard characters in Ascii-Files

[Peter Dalgaard]

"Schneider, Manuel" <Manuel.Schneider at eawag.ch> writes:

> Dear R-list
> 
> In R 2.1.1 under Win XP on a P4 with 2GB Ram when typing
> > temp<-matrix(c(1:16000000),4000,4000)
> > write(file="temp.txt", temp)
> > scan("temp.txt")
> 
> I receive:
> Error in scan("temp.txt") : scan() expected 'a real', received '414851'
> 
> The motivation for evoquing this meassage is that I am getting the same
> meassage with exported Ascii-Files from the GIS. The files contain very
> few, randomly scattered non-standard Ascii-characters. This seems to be
> a local problem on my machine but I do not have a clue on the reason
> (OS, Memory, HD?) nor who to ask. 
> So, my apologies for misusing this list and many thanks for any
> suggestion.

I tried this on a Linux box (with a somewhat outdated R version though),
and apart from eating up memory and disk space, nothing untoward seems
to happen:

> temp<-matrix(c(1:16000000),4000,4000)
> write(file="/tmp/temp.txt", temp)
> dummy <- scan("/tmp/temp.txt")
Read 16000000 items

I'd suspect your harddisk or the disk controller...

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