Unknown n_max parameter in read.table base read function

Post author: Yuan Liu
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Posted on 2021-10-10 Edited on 2022-05-07

Last time, I was reading three large tab delimited files into R (4.0.X) using read.table().

1st: 1.2M rows

2nd: 0.8M rows

3rd: 0.3M rows

The function did not fully parse the first file, and only 0.3M rows were susscefully read into memory. No problem was identified in the latter two files. I did not find any support documentation to elucidate the n_max behavior.

read.delim and read_delim(tidyverse) did fully parse the files.

read.table is NOT recommended!