I have a very large tab-delimited file, too big to store in memory via readLines() or read.delim(). Turns out I only need a few hundred of those lines to be read in. If it were not so large, I could read the entire file in and "grep" the lines I need. For such a large file; many calls to read.delim() with incrementing "skip" and "nrows" parameters, followed by grep() calls is very slow. I am aware of possibilities via SQLite; I would prefer to not use that in this case.
My question is...Is there a function for efficiently reading in a file along the lines of read.delim(), which allows me to specify a filter (via grep or something else) that tells the function to only read in certain lines that match? If not, I would *love* to see a "filter" parameter added as an option to read.delim() and/or readLines(). thanks for any pointers. --David [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.