Tony Plate <tplate <at> blackmesacapital.com> writes: > I get the best read performance out of S-plus by using > a homegrown binary file format with each column stored in a contiguous > block of memory and meta data (i.e., column types and dimensions) stored at > the start of the file. The S-plus read function reads the columns one at a > time using readRaw(). One would be able to do something similar in R. If > you have to read from a text file, then, as others have suggested, writing > a C program wouldn't be that hard, as long as you make the format inflexible.
At one time there was a program around (independent of R) that would read in a file in numerous formats including text and write out an R .rda file (among other formats). The .rda file could then be rapidly read into R using the R load command. Unfortunately the author withdrew it and it is no longer available. I suspect that if someone came up with such a program in C code but to keep it simple just restricted it to ASCII input files with a minimum number of data types and .rda or homegrown binary output it would be of general interest to the R community. ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html