[R] Read from url requiring authentication?

[Damien]

Hi all,

I'm looking into opening an url on a server which requires
authentication.

After failing to find some kind of connection structure to fill in I
turned to explicitly stating the credentials in the url itself (e.g.
"http://username:pass@site.com").
Sadly this didn't do the trick either and both source() and url()
failed trying to resolve the username ()

Is there anything I missed in the documentation/internet/groups?
If not could I maybe add to the existing R functions as it doesn't
seem too far of a stretch to allow the username and password in the
url string fed to the web server?

Thanks,
Damien