This might seem like a strange question but is there any way to compress an
R object (such as a matrix) and know its resulting size in bytes ?
Clearly, I could implement this in the following way (if x is my matrix):
      zz <- gzfile(fname,"w");
      write.table(x,zz);
      close(zz);
      file.info(fname)[,"size"];
However, I need to do this for hundreds of thousands of objects and the
overhead in terms of disk access due to the actual file creation is
prohibitive.

I guess, I would like a modified object.size() function that returns the
size of the compressed (e.g. gzip) version of the object.

Thanks!

Markus

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