[R] readBin into a data frame

[Uwe Ligges]

On 01.08.2013 10:36, Zhang Weiwu wrote:
> Hello. readBin is designed to read a batch of data with the same spec,
> e.g. read 10000 floats into a vector. In practise I read into data
> frame, not vector.  For each data frame, I need to read a integer and a
> float.
>
> for (i in 1:1000) {
>      dataframe$int[i]   <- readBin(con, integer(), size=2)
>      dataframe$float[i] <- readBin(con, numeric(), size=4)
> }


Ideally one would read bunches of identical types within R. This seems 
not to be possible here, hence I'd suggest to read it via some C code.

Best,
Uwe Ligges



>
> And I need to read 100 such data files, ending up with a for loop in a
> for loop. Something feels wrong here, as it is being said if you use
> double-FOR you are not speaking R.
>
> What is the R way of doing this? I can think of writing the content of
> the loop into a function, and vectorize it -- But, the result would be a
> list of list, not exactly data-frame, and the list grows incrementally,
> which is inefficient, since I know the size of my data frame at the
> outset. I am a new learner, not speaking half of R vocabulary, kindly
> provide some hint please:)
>
> Best.
>
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