[R] problem

[David Winsemius]

Philipp Pagel <p.pagel at wzw.tum.de> wrote in
news:20080305120637.GA8181 at localhost: 

> On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 12:32:19PM +0100, Erika Frigo wrote:
>> My file has not only more than a million values, but more than a
>> million rows and moreless 30 columns (it is a productive dataset 
>> for cows), infact with read.table i'm not able to import it.
>> It is an xls file.

There is something very wrong here. Even the most recent versions of 
Excel cannot handle files with a million rows. Heck, they can't even 
handle files with one-tenth than number. In earlier versions the limit 
was on the order of 36K.

-- 
David Winsemius

> 
> read.table() expects clear text -- e.g. csv or tab separated in the
> case of read.delim(). If your file is in xls format the simplest
> option would be to export the data to CSV format from Excel.
> 
> If for some reason that is not an option please have a look at the
> "R Data Import/Export" manual.
> 
> Of course neither will solve the problem of not enough memory if
> your file is simply too large. In that case you will may want to put
> your data into a database and have R connect to it and retrieve the
> data in smaller chunks as required.
> 
> cu
>      Philipp
>