What do you want with the row names? The help file for ?write.table
lists a row.names argument which can be set to FALSE.

regards,
Paul

On 09/06/2011 02:58 PM, Mark Ebbert wrote:
> 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
>>


-- 
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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