Scanning data files line-by-line

Maybe I'm missing something.  When I do readLines( "file", n = 1) and
repeat, it always reads the first line of "file".  I've to be able to
advance to the next line, no?
You need to open the connection first.  readLines( "file", n = 1)
opens file "file", reads a line and then closes "file".  It has no idea
that you want to keep reading the same file.
I'll take a look at the command file(), as someone else suggested.
It's open() you need, as in

con <- file("file")
open(con)
for(i in 1:10) print(readLines(con, n=1))
close(con)

In C you would need to (f)open a file to read it line-by-line, just as 
here.

The first two lines can be collapsed to

con <- file("file", "r")
Thanks.

From: Duncan Murdoch <dmurdoch at pair.com>
To: "R A F" <raf1729 at hotmail.com>
CC: R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R] Scanning data files line-by-line
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 08:26:26 -0400

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 11:51:00 +0000, you wrote:

Hi all, is there a way to read a data file into R line-by-line, akin
to what fscanf does in C, say?

It seems that "scan" and "read.table" both read the entire data file
in at once, whereas "readLines" allows one to read a file partially,
but doesn't quite read line-by-line either.
That's what readLines(con, n=1) is supposed to do; in what way does it
not quite work?

Duncan

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Scanning data files line-by-line

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