reading and parsing gzipped files

Hi all,I have  large  compressed text tab delimited  files,
I am trying to write efficient function to read them,
I am using   gzfile()  and readLines()

zz <- gzfile("exampl.txt.gz", "r")  # compressed file
system.time(temp1<-readLines(zz ))
close(zz)

which work fast, and create vector of strings.
The problem is to parse the result, if  I use strsplit  it takes longer then
decompress file manually , read it with scan and erase it.

Can anybody recommend  an efficient way of parsing large vector  ~200,000
entries

Dmitriy

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