[R] readBin into a data frame

Zhang Weiwu zhangweiwu at realss.com
Thu Aug 1 10:36:10 CEST 2013


Hello. readBin is designed to read a batch of data with the same spec, e.g. 
read 10000 floats into a vector. In practise I read into data frame, not 
vector.  For each data frame, I need to read a integer and a float.

for (i in 1:1000) {
 	dataframe$int[i]   <- readBin(con, integer(), size=2)
 	dataframe$float[i] <- readBin(con, numeric(), size=4)
}

And I need to read 100 such data files, ending up with a for loop in a for 
loop. Something feels wrong here, as it is being said if you use double-FOR 
you are not speaking R.

What is the R way of doing this? I can think of writing the content of the 
loop into a function, and vectorize it -- But, the result would be a list of 
list, not exactly data-frame, and the list grows incrementally, which is 
inefficient, since I know the size of my data frame at the outset. I am a 
new learner, not speaking half of R vocabulary, kindly provide some hint 
please:)

Best.



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