[R] readLines vs scan

[Bert Gunter]

Folks:

Suppose I wish to input a text file with variable length lines and
possible whitespace as is and then parse the resulting character
vector in R. Each line of text is terminated with "\n" (newline
character).

Is there any reason to prefer one or the other of:

scan (filename, what ="a",sep ="\n")  ##or
readLines(filename)

If it makes a difference, I'm on Windows.

Many thanks for any advice/insight.

-- 
Best,

Bert Gunter
Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics

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