Read in a all-character file and specify field separator and records separator

Dear list

I used to use python or awk do preliminary process and then feed into
R. In some circumstances, the data transmission becomes quite a pain.
I am wondering if there is a convenient way to read in R text file
(not data, text file in common sense) and specify field separator and
records separator, so the whole work can be reduced to one-stop
shopping.
or simply, is there one simple way to read in the text file with each
row in a single column. scan(....sep="\n") does not work as expected.

Thanks

yong