Yes, you have the operation precisely right.  What happens if
you coerce your data frame to a matrix:

data.mat <- as.matrix(data)

and then do the paste and writeLines?

Pat


array chip wrote:

>Patrick,
>
>Thanks for the suggestion. do you mean you need to
>change each row of the data frame into a text string
>using something like "paste(data[1,],collapse='\t')"
>and then output the resulting character vector into a
>file using writeLines?
>
>It seems not working with my data mainly because my
>data is in a data frame, not in a matrix. even a
>single operation like "data[1,]" takes tremendous time
>to complete (I think it will be much easier and faster
>if my data is in a matrix).
>
>If anyone has suggestions, I would appreciate letting
>me know.
>
>Thanks anyway.
>
>
>--- Patrick Burns <pburns@pburns.seanet.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>I had a similar problem not long ago.  My solution
>>was to
>>look at the definition of "write.table" and
>>essentially do it
>>by hand.  The key steps are to create a matrix of
>>characters
>>that includes the dimnames (if desired), and then
>>use
>>"writeLines" to put that into a file.
>>
>>My machine has 1G as well and my problem was a
>>numeric
>>matrix that was 5000 square.  So you should have no
>>problem.
>>
>>Patrick Burns
>>
>>Burns Statistics
>>patrick@burns-stat.com
>>+44 (0)20 8525 0696
>>http://www.burns-stat.com
>>(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S
>>User")
>>
>>array chip wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>I am having trouble of exporting a large data frame
>>>out of R to be used in other purpose. The data
>>>      
>>>
>>frame
>>    
>>
>>>is numeric with size 17000x400. It takes a quite
>>>      
>>>
>>some
>>    
>>
>>>time to start R as well. my computer has 1GB RAM. I
>>>used the following command to write the data frame
>>>      
>>>
>>to
>>    
>>
>>>a text file and got the error message below:
>>>
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>write.table(xxx, "C:\\xxx", sep="\t",
>>>>   
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>row.names=FALSE,col.names=FALSE,quote=FALSE)
>>>
>>>Error: cannot allocate vector of size 55750 Kb
>>>In addition: Warning message: 
>>>Reached total allocation of 1023Mb: see
>>>help(memory.size) 
>>>
>>>I tried to increase the memory size by
>>>memory.size(size=), but it seems running the above
>>>command takes forever.
>>>
>>>what can I do with this error message to get the
>>>      
>>>
>>data
>>    
>>
>>>out? 
>>>
>>>Thanks
>>>
>>>______________________________________________
>>>R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>>>      
>>>
>>https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>    
>>
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>    
>>
>
>______________________________________________
>R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>
>
>  
>


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