This help topic is for R version 0.60. For the current version of R, try https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/scan.html
scan {base}R Documentation

Read Data Values

Description

The value of what can be a list of types, in which case scan returns a list of vectors with the types given by the types of the elements in what. This provides a way of reading columnar data.

Keyboard entry is terminated by typing a blank line.

Usage

scan(file="", what=numeric(), nmax=0, sep="",
        skip=0, nlines=0)

Arguments

file

the name of a file to read data values from. If the specified file is "", then input is taken from the keyboard (in this case input can be terminated by a blank line).

what

the type of what gives the type of data to be read. If what is a list it is assumed that the lines of the data file are records which each contain length(what) items.

nmax

the maximum number of data values to be read, or if what is a list, the maximum number of records to be read.

sep

by default, scan expects to read white-space delimited input fields. Alternatively, sep can be used to specify a character which delimits fields.

skip

this many lines of the input file should be skipped before starting to read data values.

nlines

the maximum number of lines of data to be read.

See Also

read.table for more user-friendly reading of data matrices. write.

Examples

system("echo 'TITEL extra line' > ex.data")
system("echo 2 3 5 7 >> ex.data")
system("echo 11 13 17 >> ex.data")
scan("ex.data", skip = 1)
[Package base version 0.60 ]