[R] About reading data into R

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Rui Song wrote:

> Thanks for your reply, I chose to use scan here. So can I ask another
> question, which function works faster, scan or read.table?

read.table calls scan, and the two functions do different jobs.

read.table reads in a data frame.
scan reads a vector or list

Since neither can do exactly what the other does, neither can be faster.

For further discussion, including on speed, please read ?read.table and
the `R Data Import/Export' manual.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595