R - Reading lines from a .txt-file after a specific line

1) read.pattern read.pattern in gsubfn can be used to read only lines matching a specific pattern. In this example we match beginning of line, optional space(s), 1 or more digits, 1 or more spaces, an optional minus followed by 1 or more digits, optional space(s), end of line. The portions matching the parenthesized portions of the regexp are returned as columns in a data.frame. text = Lines in this self contained example can be replaced with "myfile.txt", say, if the data is coming from a file. Modify the pattern to suit.

Lines <- "junk
junk
##XYDATA= (X++(Y..Y))
131071    -2065
131070    -4137
131069    -6408
131068    -8043"

library(gsubfn)
DF <- read.pattern(text = Lines, pattern = "^ *(\\d+) +(-?\\d+) *$")

giving:

> DF
      V1    V2
1 131071 -2065
2 131070 -4137
3 131069 -6408
4 131068 -8043

2) read twice Another possibility using only base R is simply to read it once to determine the value of skip= and a second time to do the actual read using that value. To read from a file myfile.txt replace text = Lines and textConnection(Lines) with "myfile.txt" .

read.table(text = Lines, 
    skip = grep("##XYDATA=", readLines(textConnection(Lines))))

Added Some revisions and added second approach.

This looks like a job for data.table's fread

library(data.table)
impcoord <- fread("file.txt",skip="coordinatesXY")

--edit--

That is why it is good to give a reproducible example. That error means your file is causing trouble.

The skip command matches the text you give it to the file to identify what line to start at, so you need to give it a unique string from the start of the line that you want it to start reading from. That function would work for something like this:

## some random text
## some more random text
## More random text
table_heading1, table_heading2, table_heading3 ...etc
value1, value2, value3 ... etc
etc

Just_The_Table <- fread("the_above_as_a_text_file.txt", skip="table_heading1", header=T)

A possible approach could be the following:

conn<-file("file.txt",open="rt")
x<-TRUE
while (x) {
    x<-!grepl("coordinatesXY",readLines(conn,n=1))
}
ret<-read.table(conn,...) #insert additional parameters to read.table
close(conn)

You read one line at the time from the input file and stop when you find the indicator string. Then you read the file through read.table. With this approach you don't store the entire file in memory, but just the piece you need.