[R] Creating a custom connection to read from multiple files

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Tomas Kalibera wrote:

> is it possible to create my own connection which I could use with

Yes.  In a sense, all the connections are custom connections written by 
someone.

> read.table or scan ? I would like to create a connection that would read
> from multiple files in sequence (like if they were concatenated),
> possibly with an option to skip first n lines of each file. I would like
> to avoid using platform specific scripts for that... (currently I invoke
> "/bin/cat" from R to create a concatenation of all those files).

I would use pipes, but a pure R solution is to process the files to an 
anonymous file() connection and then read that.

However, what is wrong with reading a file at a time and combining the 
results in R using rbind?

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595