Quicker way to read single column of CSV file

Question

I am trying to read a single column of a CSV file to R as quickly as possible. I am hoping to cut down on standard methods in terms of the time it take

Answer 1

I would suggest

scan(pipe("cut -f1 -d, Main.csv"))

This differs from the original proposal (read.table(pipe("cut -f1 Main.csv"))) in a couple of different ways:

• since the file is comma-separated and cut assumes tab-separation by default, you need to specify d, to specify comma-separation
• scan() is much faster than read.table for simple/unstructured data reads.

According to the comments by the OP this takes about 4 rather than 40+ seconds.