[R] Faster Printing Alternatives to 'cat'

[Gundala Viswanath]

Dear all,

I found that printing with 'cat' is very slow.

For example in my machine this snippet

__BEGIN__

# I need to resolve to use this type of loop.
# because using write(), I need to create a matrix  which
# consumes so much memory. Note that "foo, bar, qux" object
# is already very large (>2Gb)

for ( s in 1:length(x) ) {
    cat(as.character(foo[s]),"\t",bar[s],"\t", qux[s],"\n")
}
__END__

for "x" of size ~1.5million, takes more than 10 hours to print.
On my Linux 1994.MHz AMD processor.

Is there any faster alternatives to "cat" ?


- Gundala Viswanath
Jakarta - Indonesia