[R] cannot open connection: Authorization Required

Fri Oct 3 20:23:33 CEST 2008

Hi, All:

      Is there a way in R to access a file / web site that requires
permission?

      Consider for example the following:

> readLines('http://www.r-project.org/', 4)
[1] "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN\">"
[2] "<html>"
[3] "<head>"
[4] "<title>The R Project for Statistical Computing</title>"

> readLines(URL) # URL = web address, which I can see via manual access. 
Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In file(con, "r") :
  cannot open: HTTP status was '401 Authorization Required'

      Thanks,
      Spencer Graves

 > sessionInfo()
R version 2.7.2 (2008-08-25)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United 
States.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United 
States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

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