How to read a text file to a list array?

Question

I just started coding in R-Lang and I was wondering what the best way to read a plan text file is? I am looking for something like this pseudo-code: ``` data = new List(); data = file.readall("myfile.txt") close foreach (a in data) { print(a) } ``` pretty simple text, I read the tutorials but dont understand how R's file access works, it looks very much different to anything im used to.. I'm unsure what args to use.

Accepted Answer

Your pseudocode in R style:

```
dat = readLines("file.txt")
```

Now `dat` is a vector where each line in the file is an element in the vector. R is a functionally oriented language, so this performs a given function on each element:

```
l = lapply(dat, process_line)
```

Where `process_line` is the function that processes each line. The result is a list of processed lines. To put them into a `data.frame`:

```
do.call("rbind", l)
```

Or use `ldply` from the `plyr` package to do this in one go:

```
require(plyr)
ldply(dat, process_line)
```

How to read a text file to a list array?

Solution

Problem