R download file from internet

Created on 23 June 2013
Revised on Thu Aug 15 13:23:06 2013

1. download.file()

temporaryFile <- tempfile()
download.file("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8272421/test.txt", destfile=temporaryFile, method="curl")    ## doesn't work, may be becayse of "https" (not "http")
myData <- read.csv(temporaryFile)
dim(myData)

2. RCurl

Method 1

require(RCurl)

## Loading required package: RCurl

## Loading required package: bitops

myCsv <- getURL("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8272421/test.txt", ssl.verifypeer = FALSE)
myData <- read.csv(textConnection(myCsv))
dim(myData)

## [1] 2 2

Method 2

require(RCurl)
library(XML)

## Warning: package 'XML' was built under R version 3.0.1

fileUrl <- "https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8272421/test.txt"
myCsv <- getURL(fileUrl, ssl.verifypeer = FALSE)
temporaryFile <- tempfile()
con <- file(temporaryFile, open = "w")
cat(myCsv, file = con)
close(con)
myData <- read.csv(temporaryFile)
dim(myData)

## [1] 2 2

3. windows only

myData <- read.csv("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8272421/test.txt", header=T)
dim(myData)

4. Load a given URL into a WWW browser

browseURL("http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FinCal/index.html")