Dear R experts,

For quite some time I have been trying to solve a mistery of reading a seemingly trouble-free text file. The data is temperature reconstruction arranged as a huge grid, preceded by seven "header lines" (which you see better if file is opened in Firefox or Chrome).

This is the data (gridded temperature reconstruction)
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/historical/europe/casty2007/temp-mon.txt

And this is original data description:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/historical/europe/casty2007/readme-casty2007.txt
Basically, it is says "space-delimited ASCII format" there ...

I tried this:
Temperature<-read.table(FileName,skip = 7, header = TRUE, na.strings="NA",sep="")

But ..


> Temperature <- read.table(FileName, skip = 7, header = FALSE, sep="")
Error in read.table(FileName, skip = 7, header = FALSE, sep = "") :
  empty beginning of file





Trying read.csv gives this:



Error: cannot allocate vector of size 370.5 Mb



I attempted to handle this by opening and resaving the file in another software, but even if I can still see the first lines of the file in the import dialog, the full reading of the file always ends up with an error, possibly because of the huge humber of columns ..



I believe the problem is with some special encoding but I cannot figure out how to go around it.



Could some of you give me any hint on that?



many thanks in advance

Igor

Igor Drobyshev
Dendrochronological laboratory at Station de Recheche FERLD, director
Chaire industrielle CRSNG-UQAT-UQAM en aménagement forestier durable
Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue
445 boul . de l'Université
Rouyn-Noranda, QC
Canada J9X5E4
http://www.dendro.uqat.ca/

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