Hi all,

First off, it is surprising that there are no examples of how to use
read.table() under ?read.table !

I am trying to read in a flat file of type 'raw'. It has 1000 rows and 600K
columns. I have the RAM to accomplish this, but can't get the data into R
using read.table:

x <- read.table("data",header=TRUE,colClasses=rep(,600000))
#returns error:  no method or default for coercing "character" to "raw"

Then I thought that maybe the colClasses vector needed to actually *be* the
mode needed (here's where an example under ?read.table would help):

x <- read.table("data",header=TRUE,colClasses=rep(as.raw(1),600000))

I waited on the latter command for a couple of hours before killing the
process. What should the colClasses argument be?

Should I be using another method to read the data into R? Previous
experience using scan() and readLines() showed that read.table() was faster,
at least for those examples, so I've stopped trying to use those other
functions.

Thank you,

JJ

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