[R] read.table opening a website incl Password

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, Roland Rau wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> in the past I have been able to access websites with data directly. For
> example the following code works nicely
>
> mydata <-
> read.table("http://www.lifetable.de/data/MPIDR/POL_2004.txt", 	header=TRUE)
>
> But what happens if I need a username and password (a different site)?
> How do I do that? Or is it not possible to this in R?
> I tried something like this
>
> mydata.frame <- read.table("myusr:mypswd at www.mydata.com/adir/afile.txt")
>
> but it did not work.

Well, it could not.  You need ftp:// or http:// for this to be a URL. This 
ought to work for ftp:, but AFAIK not for http:.  You could always try 
--internet2: if it works in IE, it will probably also work in R.

> I'd appreciate any hints.
> My platform is Win32 (and I am actually running R 2.3.1, but I guess
> (hope!) this is not the reason. At least I checked the NEWS file whether
> any changes appeared since 2.3.1 which could affect this behavior).
>
> Thanks,
> Roland
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595