Hi Edouard,

I'm not sure R will handle the file if it so large that it crashes QGIS, but you can read e00 files into R using the RArcInfo package. This post is a little old, but it shows you how you can convert e00 files to SpatialPolygons using the RArcInfo package in combination with the maptools package: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2009-June/005849.html

You may also have a look at the plotpoly() function in RArcInfo: http://www.inside-r.org/packages/cran/RArcInfo/docs/plotpoly

Hope it helps.

Cheers

Thijs Christiaan

 Uses GDAL libraries from Processing Toolbox of QGIS .."convert format"

http://www.gdal.org/

Thanks Pino, unfortunately I get a crash with a message saying FAILURE: Couldn't fetch requested layer 'nosbath'!. Any idea ?

R software processes only objects that are held in memory. If the object size exceeds your computer capability then the options are either to reduce the size of the data held in memory by reading only part of the file within the code - or to reduce the size of the file in advance.

If the data can be read in prior to failing due to expansion by your code then you should be able to split it. First understand the size of the data: use object_size - see http://adv-r.had.co.nz/memory.html

There are various techniques for doing this with different file formats, but I'm not overly familiar with e00. If this is an ASCII format then a csv splitter may be successful, although you may want to check for header info in the original and ensure to preserve this across any split files - http://www.mathfinance.cn/excellent-free-csv-splitter/.

If you continue to have trouble then it might be worthwhile either sourcing the short-term use of a computer with greater memory on which to split the bathy data or alternatively return to the data supplier and asking if this can be split at source.

One solution may be IMPORT71 utility.

Read more about how to use this utility in E00 import here:

http://freegeographytools.com/2007/converting-e00-vector-data-to-shapefiles-a-free-and-fairly-painless-approach

And, this maybe helps you

http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/82044/how-to-read-arc-info-e00-vector-files-no-binaries-with-python

Regards..!