On 10/18/2012 09:57 AM, Fisher Dennis wrote:
R 2.15.1
OS X

Colleagues,

I am reading a 1 GB file into R using read.table.  The file consists of 100 
tables, each of which is headed by two lines of characters.
The first of these lines is:
        TABLE NO.  1
The second is a list of column headers.

For example:
TABLE NO.  1
  COL1        COL2        COL3        COL4        COL5        COL6        COL7  
      COL8        COL9        COL10       COL11       COL12
   1.0010E+05  0.0000E+00  1.0000E+00  1.0000E+03 -1.0000E+00  1.0000E+00  
0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00
   1.0010E+05  1.0001E+01  1.0000E+00  1.0000E+03 -1.0000E+00  1.0000E+00  
2.2737E-14 -2.2737E-14  0.0000E+00  1.9281E-08  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00
   1.0010E+05  2.4000E+01  1.0000E+00  2.0000E+03 -1.0000E+00  1.0000E+00  
5.7541E-15 -5.7541E-15  0.0000E+00  5.1115E-13  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00

Later something similar appears:
TABLE NO.  1
  COL1        COL2        COL3        COL4        COL5        COL6        COL7  
      COL8        COL9        COL10       COL11       COL12
   1.0010E+05  0.0000E+00  1.0000E+00  1.0000E+03 -1.0000E+00  1.0000E+00  
0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00
   1.0010E+05  1.0001E+01  1.0000E+00  1.0000E+03 -1.0000E+00  1.0000E+00  
2.2737E-14 -2.2737E-14  0.0000E+00  1.9281E-08  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00
   1.0010E+05  2.4000E+01  1.0000E+00  2.0000E+03 -1.0000E+00  1.0000E+00  
5.7541E-15 -5.7541E-15  0.0000E+00  5.1115E-13  0.0000E+00  0.0000E+00

I will use the term "problematic lines" to refer to the repeated occurrences of 
the two non-data lines

read.table is not successful in reading the table because of these problematic lines (I 
get around the first "TABLE NO." line using the skip option)

My word-around has been to:
        1.  read the table with readLines
        2.  remove the problematic lines
        3.  write the file to disk
        4.  read the file with read.table.
However, this process is slow.

I though about using "comment.char" as a means of avoiding reading the problematic lines. 
 However, comment.char does not accept ="[A-Z]"

Are there any clever workarounds for this?

Create a connection to a pipe, where pipe reads from the grep command. Grep can exlude the problematic lines. Use the pipe object as your connection in read.table.

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