[R] Compress string memCompress/Decompress

[Erik Wright]

Hello,

I would like to compress a long string (character vector), store the compressed string in the text field of a SQLite database (using RSQLite), and then load the text back into memory and decompress it back into the the original string.  My character vector can be compressed considerably using standard gzip/bzip2 compression.  In theory it should be much faster for me to compress/decompress a long string than to write the whole string to the hard drive and then read it back (not to mention the saved hard drive space).

I have tried accomplishing this task using memCompress() and memDecompress() without success.  It seems memCompress can only convert a character vector to raw type which cannot be treated as a string.  Does anyone have ideas on how I can go about doing this, especially using the standard base packages?

Thanks!,
Erik


> sessionInfo()
R version 2.11.0 (2010-04-22) 
x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0 

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_2.11.0