[R] Reading zipped data directly from an FTP url

[michael watson (IAH-C)]

Hi

Sorry, I am clearly missing something here.

I want to read this file directly:
ftp://ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub/mirbase/targets/v5/arch.v5.txt.gallus_gallus.
zip

I tried using 

read.table(gzfile("ftp://ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub/mirbase/targets/v5/arch.v5
.txt.gallus_gallus.zip"))

But I got an error:

Error in open.connection(file, "r") : cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In open.connection(file, "r") :
  cannot open compressed file
'ftp://ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub/mirbase/targets/v5/arch.v5.txt.gallus_gallus
.zip', probable reason 'No such file or directory'

With all the different ways of opening connections (url(), unz(),
gzfile(), gzcon() etc) I am just getting a bit lost.  The above zip
archive contains a single tab-delimited file, but one which I need to
skip the first 5 lines.

Any help appreciated!

Thanks
Mick