Thank you for your help. The data is meant to be processed by a separate program that expects a simple matrix with row and column names in ascii format. "write.matrix" does exactly what I want except for the row names. It baffles me that this is not an option…
On Sep 6, 2011, at 8:22 AM, Paul Hiemstra wrote: > On 09/06/2011 06:24 AM, Mark Ebbert wrote: >> Dear R gurus, >> >> I am trying to write several large matrices (~ 1GB) to separate files. I >> have learned that write.table is simply too slow for this task and was >> attempting to use write.matrix, but write.matrix does not have the ability >> to include row names in the output. Anyone know why that's the case? I've >> seen a thread stating that write.matrix is the way to go for large prints to >> files, but it doesn't do what I need it to. Since write.matrix wasn't >> working I tried both sink and capture.output, but then the output is printed >> to the file using the same 'width' restrictions as the general >> "options(width=)" limit. >> >> Any ideas on how to print a large matrix with row names? I could write a >> perl script to modify the files after the fact, but I shouldn't have to do >> that. >> >> Thanks for your help! >> >> Mark T. W. Ebbert >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > > Hi, > > What do you want with the data? If you want to store an R matrix on disk > for later use in R, take a look at ?save. If it is for use in another > programming language, I would write the matrix in binary format > (?writebin). This saves a lot of space and prevents any (significant) > rounding errors. It is probably also quite a bit faster. If you really > need some more metadata (such as rownames), I would add a second text > file which stores this information. Sort of a binary file plus a header, > which is a quite common format for storing data. Maybe you can even find > a standard binary format which you can use. But it is impossible to > comment on this because you did not provide information as to what you > want to do with the saved data. > > good luck! > Paul > > -- > Paul Hiemstra, Ph.D. > Global Climate Division > Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) > Wilhelminalaan 10 | 3732 GK | De Bilt | Kamer B 3.39 > P.O. Box 201 | 3730 AE | De Bilt > tel: +31 30 2206 494 > > http://intamap.geo.uu.nl/~paul > http://nl.linkedin.com/pub/paul-hiemstra/20/30b/770 > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
