CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
bumpkin
bumpkin

Reputation: 3469

Read in arbitrary file as string, then save back to file? Always corrupted

I'm trying to simply read in an arbitrary file into R as a string. Then save it to another location.

data = readLines("/path_to_file/")
con = file("/new_path_to_file", "w")
writeLines(data, con)
close(con)

Every time the new file is corrupted (testing with this image: http://lacuadramagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sangeh-monkey-forest-101.jpg).

I also tried readChar but depending on the file, I get a UTF-8 error.

I want to be able to do this with any file - image, text, etc. This is part of a larger analysis (so file.copy doesn't cut it), but I can't even get the basic read/write mechanism down. Should be simple but getting stumped.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 311

Answers (1)

MrFlick
MrFlick

Reputation: 206207

You are working with binary data here, not character data. Most likely you should be working with

setwd("~/../Desktop")
fn<-"sangeh-monkey-forest-101.jpg"
img<-readBin(fn, raw(), file.info(fn)$size)
writeBin(img, "out.jpg")

You can try converting to character with functions like rawToChar(img) but since R strings can't contain null values (which your's does -- which(img==0)) you can't really represent this as a properly encoded string.

Upvotes: 1

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