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
>> ______________________________________________
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>> 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
> 

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