read.octave             package:foreign             R Documentation

Read Octave Text Data Files

Description:

     Read a file in Octave text data format into a list.

Usage:

     read.octave(file)

Arguments:

    file: a character string with the name of the file to read.

Details:

     This function is used to read in files in Octave text data format,
     as created by 'save -ascii' in Octave.  It knows about most of the
     common types of variables, including the standard atomic (real and
     complex scalars, matrices, and N-d arrays, strings, ranges, and
     boolean scalars and matrices) and recursive (structs, cells, and
     lists) ones, but has no guarantee to read all types.  If a type is
     not recognized, a warning indicating the unknown type is issued,
     it is attempted to skip the unknown entry, and 'NULL' is used as
     its value.  Note that this will give incorrect results, and maybe
     even errors, in the case of unknown recursive data types.

     As Octave can read MATLAB binary files, one can make the contents
     of such files available to R by using Octave's load and save (as
     text) facilities as an intermediary step.

Value:

     A list with one named component for each variable in the file.

Author(s):

     Stephen Eglen stephen@gnu.org and Kurt Hornik

References:

     <URL: http://www.octave.org/>

