I'm been doing more and more of file text parsing inside R instead of coping with Perl. For that, I need open a file and read it line-by-line. I found the documentation for 'open' isn't very clear.
Right now it has ,----[ *help(R)[open]* ] | 'open' opens a connection. In general functions using connections | will open them if they are not open, but then close them again, so | to leave a connection open call 'open' explicitly. `---- It seems that one has to call 'open' to open a live connection that can be parsed line by line (using readLines() or scan() to read). But open() cannot be directly applied to a file name. In fact, one only needs supply the 'open' argument in file() with something other than the empty string, ,---- | > con <- file ("S200.dat") | > isOpen (con) | [1] FALSE | > con <- file ("S200.dat", open = "r") | > isOpen (con) | [1] TRUE `---- It is not clear to me how 'open()' is supposed to be used. It took me a while to figure this out and I thought it might be worthwhile to add one sentence or two to make it more clear in the doc. Cheers, Michael -- Na (Michael) Li, Ph.D. Division of Biostatistics A443 Mayo Building, MMC 303 School of Public Health 420 Delaware St SE University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455 Phone: (612) 626-4765 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax: (612) 626-0660 http://www.biostat.umn.edu/~nali GPG Public Key: http://www.umn.edu/lookup?SET_INSTITUTION=UMNTC&UID=nali&show_pgp=1 ______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel