[R-sig-Geo] from idirisi to s-plus to r

[Seth J Myers]

Hi,

I use IDRISI as my main raster GIS program and R for stats.  IDRISI has an export to s-plus function that allows you to mask a raster file for sampling and then export into a format that supposedly works with s-plus.  What this ends up being is a .txt file with spaces between adjacent columns but no seeming rhyme or reason as far as column width (it varies seemingly arbitrarily and IDRISI help is no help in this area).  They are of fixed width for each column, but the width is not consistent among columns.  

I know I could import IDRISI .rst files into R, but this is very wasteful of memory as I only need a small % of large files.  My questions are: 1) is there an easier export format to move a sample of an IDRISI .rst file into R?  2) is there a way to import a .txt file into R that will ignore repetitive spacing?  (meaning two columns can be separated by 1 or more spaces but the number of spaces is not specified).  I would just specify column width for each column in each file, but I have many files with 43 columns each, so I prefer to avoid brute force here.  Thanks, Seth