Read a text file in R line by line

You should take care with readLines(...) and big files. Reading all lines at memory can be risky. Below is a example of how to read file and process just one line at time:

processFile = function(filepath) {
  con = file(filepath, "r")
  while ( TRUE ) {
    line = readLines(con, n = 1)
    if ( length(line) == 0 ) {
      break
    }
    print(line)
  }

  close(con)
}

Understand the risk of reading a line at memory too. Big files without line breaks can fill your memory too.

Just use readLines on your file:

R> res <- readLines(system.file("DESCRIPTION", package="MASS"))
R> length(res)
[1] 27
R> res
 [1] "Package: MASS"                                                                  
 [2] "Priority: recommended"                                                          
 [3] "Version: 7.3-18"                                                                
 [4] "Date: 2012-05-28"                                                               
 [5] "Revision: $Rev: 3167 $"                                                         
 [6] "Depends: R (>= 2.14.0), grDevices, graphics, stats, utils"                      
 [7] "Suggests: lattice, nlme, nnet, survival"                                        
 [8] "Authors@R: c(person(\"Brian\", \"Ripley\", role = c(\"aut\", \"cre\", \"cph\"),"
 [9] "        email = \"[email protected]\"), person(\"Kurt\", \"Hornik\", role"  
[10] "        = \"trl\", comment = \"partial port ca 1998\"), person(\"Albrecht\","   
[11] "        \"Gebhardt\", role = \"trl\", comment = \"partial port ca 1998\"),"     
[12] "        person(\"David\", \"Firth\", role = \"ctb\"))"                          
[13] "Description: Functions and datasets to support Venables and Ripley,"            
[14] "        'Modern Applied Statistics with S' (4th edition, 2002)."                
[15] "Title: Support Functions and Datasets for Venables and Ripley's MASS"           
[16] "License: GPL-2 | GPL-3"                                                         
[17] "URL: http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/"                                      
[18] "LazyData: yes"                                                                  
[19] "Packaged: 2012-05-28 08:47:38 UTC; ripley"                                      
[20] "Author: Brian Ripley [aut, cre, cph], Kurt Hornik [trl] (partial port"          
[21] "        ca 1998), Albrecht Gebhardt [trl] (partial port ca 1998), David"        
[22] "        Firth [ctb]"                                                            
[23] "Maintainer: Brian Ripley <[email protected]>"                               
[24] "Repository: CRAN"                                                               
[25] "Date/Publication: 2012-05-28 08:53:03"                                          
[26] "Built: R 2.15.1; x86_64-pc-mingw32; 2012-06-22 14:16:09 UTC; windows"           
[27] "Archs: i386, x64"                                                               
R> 

There is an entire manual devoted to this.

Here is the solution with a for loop. Importantly, it takes the one call to readLines out of the for loop so that it is not improperly called again and again. Here it is:

fileName <- "up_down.txt"
conn <- file(fileName,open="r")
linn <-readLines(conn)
for (i in 1:length(linn)){
   print(linn[i])
}
close(conn)