[R] How to import specific column(s) using "read.table"?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck <at> myway.com> writes:

: 
: F Duan <f.duan <at> yale.edu> writes:
: 
: > I have a very big tab-delim txt file with header and I only want to import 
: > several columns into R. I checked the options for Â"read.tableÂ" and only 
: 
: Try using scan with the what=list(...) and flush=TRUE arguments.  
: For example, if your data looks like this:
: 
: 1 2 3 4 
: 5 6 7 8 
: 9 10 11 12
: 13 14 15 16
: 
: then you could read columns 2 and 4 into a list with:
: 

oops. That should be 1 and 3.

:    scan(myfile, what = list(0, NULL, 0), flush = TRUE)
: 
: or read in and convert to a data frame via:
: 
:    do.call("cbind", scan(myfile, what = list(0, NULL, 0), flush = TRUE))