readLines | R Documentation |
Read some or all text lines from a connection.
readLines(con = stdin(), n = -1L, ok = TRUE, warn = TRUE, encoding = "unknown", skipNul = FALSE)
con |
a connection object or a character string. |
n |
integer. The (maximal) number of lines to read. Negative values indicate that one should read up to the end of input on the connection. |
ok |
logical. Is it OK to reach the end of the connection before
|
warn |
logical. Warn if a text file is missing a final EOL or if there are embedded nuls in the file. |
encoding |
encoding to be assumed for input strings. It is
used to mark character strings as known to be in
Latin-1 or UTF-8: it is not used to re-encode the input. To do the
latter, specify the encoding as part of the connection |
skipNul |
logical: should nuls be skipped? |
If the con
is a character string, the function calls
file
to obtain a file connection which is opened for
the duration of the function call. This can be a compressed file.
(tilde expansion of the file path is done by file
.)
If the connection is open it is read from its current position. If it
is not open, it is opened in "rt"
mode for the duration of
the call and then closed (but not destroyed; one must call
close
to do that).
If the final line is incomplete (no final EOL marker) the behaviour depends on whether the connection is blocking or not. For a non-blocking text-mode connection the incomplete line is pushed back, silently. For all other connections the line will be accepted, with a warning.
Whatever mode the connection is opened in, any of LF, CRLF or CR will be accepted as the EOL marker for a line.
Embedded nuls in the input stream will terminate the line currently
being read, with a warning (unless skipNul = TRUE
or warn
= FALSE
).
If con
is a not-already-open connection with a non-default
encoding
argument, the text is converted to UTF-8 and declared
as such (and the encoding
argument to readLines
is ignored).
See the examples.
A character vector of length the number of lines read.
The elements of the result have a declared encoding if encoding
is
"latin1"
or "UTF-8"
,
The default connection, stdin
, may be different from
con = "stdin"
: see file
.
connections
, writeLines
, readBin
,
scan
fil <- tempfile(fileext = ".data") cat("TITLE extra line", "2 3 5 7", "", "11 13 17", file = fil, sep = "\n") readLines(fil, n = -1) unlink(fil) # tidy up ## difference in blocking fil <- tempfile("test") cat("123\nabc", file = fil) readLines(fil) # line with a warning con <- file(fil, "r", blocking = FALSE) readLines(con) # empty cat(" def\n", file = fil, append = TRUE) readLines(con) # gets both close(con) unlink(fil) # tidy up ## Not run: # read a 'Windows Unicode' file A <- readLines(con <- file("Unicode.txt", encoding = "UCS-2LE")) close(con) unique(Encoding(A)) # will most likely be UTF-8 ## End(Not run)
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