Import text file as single character string

Question

How do you import a plain text file as single character string in R  I think that this will probably have a very simple answer but when I tried this today I found that I couldn t find a function to do this   For example  suppose I have a file foo txt with something I want to textmine   I tried it with   scan  foo txt   what  character   sep NULL    but this still returned a vector  I got it working somewhat with   paste scan  foo txt   what  character   sep      collapse        but that is quite an ugly solution which is probably unstable too

User · Answer

I would use the following  It should work just fine  and doesn t seem ugly  at least to me   singleString  lt - paste readLines  foo txt    collapse

User · Answer

readChar doesn t have much flexibility so I combined your solutions  readLines and paste     I have also added a space between each line   con  lt - file   Users YourtextFile txt    r   blocking   FALSE  singleString  lt - readLines con    empty singleString  lt - paste singleString  sep        collapse        close con

User · Answer

Here s a variant of the solution from  JoshuaUlrich that uses the correct size instead of a hard-coded size   fileName  lt -  foo txt  readChar fileName  file info fileName  size    Note that readChar allocates space for the number of bytes you specify  so readChar fileName   Machine integer max  does not work well

User · Answer

How about   string  lt - readChar  foo txt  nchars 1e6

User · Answer

Too bad that Sharon s solution cannot be used anymore  I ve added Josh O Brien s solution with asieira s modification to my  Rprofile file   read text   function pathname        return  paste readLines pathname   collapse   n        and use it like this  txt   read text  path to my file txt    I couldn t replicate bumpkin s  28 oct  14  finding  and writeLines txt  showed the contents of file txt  Also  after write txt    tmp out   the command diff  tmp out path to my file txt reported no differences

User · Answer

The readr package has a function to do everything for you   install packages  readr     you only need to do this one time on your system library readr  mystring  lt - read file  path to myfile txt     This replaces the version in the package stringr

User · Answer

In case anyone is still looking at this question 3 years later  Hadley Wickham s readr package has a handy read file   function that will do this for you    you only need to do this one time on your system install packages  quot readr quot    library readr  mystring  lt - read file  quot path to myfile txt quot

User · Answer

It seems your solution is not much ugly  You can use functions and make it proffesional like these ways   first way   new function  lt - function filename     readChar filename  file info filename  size     new function  foo txt      second way   new function  lt - function      filename  lt -  foo txt    return  readChar filename  file info filename  size      new function

[r] Import text file as single character string

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