Full_Name: William E. Hopkins Version: 2.9.0 OS: Windows XP Submission from: (NULL) (209.244.4.106)
textConnection() has quadratic performance. A function I wrote was taking outrageous amount of time to execute on a large character vector (small test set was used for functional development). I created a test harness to execute the function and gather stats (system.time) for various dataset sizes (datasets generated by sample() of very large set). If I used textConnection() to provide input to read.csv(), the performance was quadratic with dataset size. However, if I had the function write the character vector to a temp file then read the data back in via read.csv, the performance was linear. The reason for using a textConnection() was that the character vector was within a data frame read in via read.csv. The character vector (URLs) needed to be parsed into separate vectors, but no mechanism exists to do that directly (that I know of). So, I used sub() to extract the proper pieces and put commas in between so that I can use read.csv() to read the comma-separate strings directly into vectors. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel