Workaround to R memory leak with XML package

Question

I am trying to run some simple program to extract tables from html code. However, there seems to be some memory issue with readHTMLTable in XML package. Is there any way I c

Answer 1

Same problem here, even doing nothing more than reading in the document with doc <- xmlParse(...); root <- xmlRoot(doc), the memory allocated to doc is just never released to the O/S (as monitored in Windows' Task Manager).

A crazy idea that we might try is to employ system("Rscript ...") to perform the XML parsing in a separate R session, saving the parsed R object to a file, which we then read in in the main R session. Hacky but it would at least ensure that whatever memory is gobbled up by the XML parsing, is released when the Rscript session terminates and doesn't affect the main process!