[R] reading in ASCII files

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2001, Johann Petrak wrote:

> I wonder if there is a way to read in CSV files so that
> - certain fields within each record (line) are ignored, i.e.
>    not converted to columns in the output data frame

No.  We've thought about that, but it's better to use external tools
(e.g. cut in Unix).

> - factors/levels are created automatically: often, the possible
>    labels are known in advance and could immediately be
>    converted. This would save a lot of memory and time for
>    bigger files, I assume.

What are these on the file?  If characters then factors/levels *are*
created automatically.  If codes then they are stored economically as
integers (in R-devel) and just need a levels attribute and class added.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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