Question

I am new to R programming language. I am downloading some scientific data which are archived in zip. On unzipping, it gives out some files having .rbin extension which are actually binary files. While on googling the term “.rbin” i am unable to find the way to use them. Can anybody show me a guide on how to use these .rbin files?

Answer 1

The extension rbin is to my knowledge not an established convention like e.g. .Rdata or .rda. I assume that you are right, and that they are binary files. To read binary files, you need to use the readBin function. To get good results, you do need to find out some details:

• What is the size of the stored binary numbers, e.g. 4 bytes.
• What is stored, e.g. logical, numeric, double, integer, etc.
• If integers are stored, are they unsigned or not.
• Is the file stored with big or little endianess.

Please take a look at ?readBin for more details.

Alternatively, the rbin file could contain a binary representation of R objects (as @Andrie commented). In this case you need to use the load function to load the objects into your workspace, see ?load for more details.