> From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Saturday, May 01, 2004 11:44 PM > You will be telling us next you think the default nmax=-1 > means to read a negative number of lines!
No, I won't. Your extrapolation is inaccurate. > ... So reading no > lines would mean not calling scan at all, and what would be > the point of that? It would mean skipping the number of lines specified in the skip argument thus advancing the read point on the connection to where I want it to be. I guess you wouldn't argue that seek(con, where) has no meaning. > > nmax <= 0 and nlines <= 0 are ignored. > > Note carefully what nmax actually means, and it is not what `nlines' > means! I had noted that. If one reads no "data value" one reads no line, so the two should have the same effect in the case at hand. > Do read the documentation for scan, too, please. I had. For your convenience this is what it says about nmax. nmax: the maximum number of data values to be read, or if 'what' is a list, the maximum number of records to be read. If omitted (and 'nlines' is not set to a positive value), 'scan' will read to the end of 'file'. It is hard to see from the text that nmax=0 is ignored since "omitted" means leaving it set to -1. BTW, the paragraph regarding 'nlines' doesn't mention that nlines=0 is a special case either. nlines: the maximum number of lines of data to be read. > Note that to read *lines* you do need to read every byte on > the file to > find the EOL marker(s) so readLines() or scan() with NULL in > "what" are as > good as anything. You can use them in blocks of lines, in a loop. This is a very nice trick indeed! Just what I've been looking for. Thank you very much, Vadim ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html