R File I/O Capability - Writing output to specific lines of existing file

From: jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [R] R File I/O Capability - Writing output to specific lines of  existing file
To: jasonkrupert at yahoo.com
Cc: R-help at r-project.org
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2009, 8:02 PM
You can always read in the initialization file, make the
updates to it
and then write it back out.  If it is a text file, it would
be very
hard to write into the middle of it since there is no
structure to the
file.  You can read it in as a table (read.table) or just
as lines
(readLines) and the make any changes you want.  You can use
regular
expressions if you want to put something in the middle of
one of the
lines you have read in.

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Jason Rupert
<jasonkrupert at yahoo.com> wrote:

Currently I am using the R "write" command

to output results to a *.txt file and then copying those
results into an initialization file. ?In an attempt to
continue to automate the process I would like to have R
write to the location in the existing initialization file,
instead of me copying the data over.

By any chance are there any R commands to help?

Primarily, I will be using Windows, and the

initialization file is a simple flat file, i.e. not XML or
binary.

I looked at:
(a)

http://www.stat.ucl.ac.be/ISdidactique/Rhelp/library/R.io/html/00Index.html

(b)

http://search.r-project.org/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi?query=File+I%2FO&max=100&result=normal&sort=score&idxname=functions&idxname=Rhelp08

But, this did not appear to provide the functionality

to edit an existing file by adding information to the middle
of the file.

Thank you again for any help and insight.