Scanning data files line-by-line

From: Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at pdf.com>
To: Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>
CC: R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch, R A F <raf1729 at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [R] Scanning data files line-by-line
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 07:28:03 -0700

With a "connection" instead of a "file", there is no counterpart to 
"count.fields" to summarize what's available?

Thanks,
Spencer Graves

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, R A F wrote:

Thanks very much.  I guess the answer leads to more questions:

(a) What if I don't know the number of lines?  So I would like to use
   a while loop until readLines hits an EOF character.  Would that
   be possible?

Yes. After you reach the end of the file you will get character(0) since

Value:

     A character vector of length the number of lines read.

and zero lines would have been read.

(b) When readLines is used, a string is returned.

Not quite: a character vector is returned.

I'd like to split
   the string into fields, and Andy Liaw suggested strsplit, but the
   number of spaces between fields is variable.  So for example, one
   line could be 1 space 2 space space 3 and the next line could be
   4 space space 5 space 6, so I could not do a strsplit using " ".

   Really what I know is the variable type of each field -- for
   example, each line is double, string, then double, etc.  How
   would one use this information to split the string given by
   readLines?

You could use scan on the line: it works on textConnections.

Thanks very much again!