Read a text file in R line by line

Question

I would like to read a text file in R, line by line, using a for loop and with the length of the file. The problem is that it only prints character(0). This is the code:

fileName="up_down.txt"
con=file(fileName,open="r")
line=readLines(con) 
long=length(line)
for (i in 1:long){
    linn=readLines(con,1)
    print(linn)
}
close(con)

Answer 1

You should take care with readLines(...) and big files. Reading all lines at memory can be risky. Below is a example of how to read file and process just one line at time:

processFile = function(filepath) {
  con = file(filepath, "r")
  while ( TRUE ) {
    line = readLines(con, n = 1)
    if ( length(line) == 0 ) {
      break
    }
    print(line)
  }

  close(con)
}

Understand the risk of reading a line at memory too. Big files without line breaks can fill your memory too.