Manage and manipulate large collections of R objects stored as tape-like files
Automatically pick proper tape file format.
Setting tape file format/compression.
Iterate over tape, discarding results.
Add object to the tape.
Load the whole tape as a list.
Rerecord the tape dropping certain objects.
Iterate over tape, gathering results.
Rerecord the tape.
Storing huge data in RData format causes problems because of the necessity to load the whole file to the memory in order to access and manipulate objects inside such file; rtape is a simple solution to this problem. The package contains several wrappers of R built-in serialize/unserialize mechanism allowing user to quickly append objects to a tape-like file and later iterate over them requiring only one copy of each stored object to reside in memory a time.