title: Reading big data with fixed width
body: <p>How can I read big data formated with fixed width? I read <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1727772/quickly-reading-very-large-tables-as-dataframes-in-r">this</a> question and tried some tips, but all answers are for delimited data (as .csv), and that's not my case. The data has 558MB, and I don't know how many lines.</p>
  
  <p>I'm using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>dados &lt;- read.fwf('TS_MATRICULA_RS.txt', width=c(5, 13, 14, 3, 3, 5, 4, 6, 6, 6, 1, 1, 1, 4, 3, 2, 9, 3, 2, 9, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1,
      1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 11, 9, 2, 3, 9, 3, 2, 9, 9, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1), stringsAsFactors=FALSE, comment.char='', 
      colClasses=c('integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'character', 'character', 'character',
      'integer', 'integer', 'character', 'integer', 'integer', 'character', 'integer', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character',
      'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character',
      'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'integer',
      'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'integer', 'character', 'integer', 'integer', 'character', 'character', 'character',
      'character', 'integer', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character', 'character'), buffersize=180000)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But it takes 30 minutes (and counting...) to read the data. Any new suggestions?</p>