Exclude columns in read.table() in R

Question

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Only read limited number of columns in R

I have a data text file with a million observations and 150 variable (v1 to v150) delimited by semicolons. I need only a selected handful of variables. Is there any way to read in only the variables I need? I am using read.table("filepath/filename.txt", sep=";", header=T). If there is any other way than read.table() with which this can be done?

Answer 1

See help(read.table) and particularly the colClasses argument. Simply set the columns you want to ignore to NULL and they will be skipped.