rtracklayer::import for signature "GFFFile,ANY,ANY" has
an argument text, the help page says:

## S4 method for signature 'GFFFile,ANY,ANY'
import(con, format, text,
           version = c("", "1", "2", "3"),
           genome = NA, colnames = NULL, which = NULL,
           feature.type = NULL, sequenceRegionsAsSeqinfo = FALSE)

text:  If con is missing, a character vector to use as the input.

But the argument does not seem to work, in fact I have looked into the source https://github.com/Bioconductor-mirror/rtracklayer/blob/1d5b9b3979d277b1dfd5642fd714d7c7bc75ca84/R/gff.R#L233-L296 , it does not seem to support that argument. In my case, I have already read the file using readLines to check the hash, and I do not want to re-read file again or write it to a temporary file then import it. Is there any way to import gff from a character vector?

For a reproducible example I went to ?import and found a gff3 file. I read it in using readLines, and then read the date using the text connection

>        test_path <- system.file("tests", package = "rtracklayer")
>        test_gff3 <- file.path(test_path, "genes.gff3")
> gff = readLines(test_gff3)
> gr = import(format="gff3", text=gff)
Warning in readGFF(filepath, version = version, filter = filter) :
  connection is not positioned at the start of the file, rewinding it

The warning seems harmless. Here's my sessionInfo()

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.4.1 Patched (2017-07-04 r72894)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /home/mtmorgan/bin/R-3-4-branch/lib/libRblas.so
LAPACK: /home/mtmorgan/bin/R-3-4-branch/lib/libRlapack.so

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] parallel  stats4    stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets 
[8] methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] rtracklayer_1.36.3   GenomicRanges_1.28.3 GenomeInfoDb_1.12.2 
[4] IRanges_2.10.2       S4Vectors_0.14.3     BiocGenerics_0.22.0 

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] lattice_0.20-35            matrixStats_0.52.2        
 [3] XML_3.98-1.9               Rsamtools_1.28.0          
 [5] Biostrings_2.44.1          GenomicAlignments_1.12.1  
 [7] bitops_1.0-6               grid_3.4.1                
 [9] zlibbioc_1.22.0            XVector_0.16.0            
[11] Matrix_1.2-10              BiocParallel_1.11.3       
[13] tools_3.4.1                Biobase_2.36.2            
[15] RCurl_1.95-4.8             DelayedArray_0.2.7        
[17] compiler_3.4.1             SummarizedExperiment_1.6.3
[19] GenomeInfoDbData_0.99.0   

What did you try, and what is your sessionInfo()?