[R] Downloading a csv from Dropbox using the shareable link

Bryan Hanson hanson at depauw.edu
Fri May 20 20:05:25 CEST 2011


Hello Kindred R Spirits...

I'm trying to get a file (csv) from Dropbox using their shareable link  
concept.  They issue a short URL that goes to a web page where you see  
a button that says "Download File".  They don't really give you the  
URL of the file itself, just this page.  Is there a way to coax R into  
getting such a file?  I don't even really want the file per se, I just  
want a path to the file so I can reference it for Sweave purposes and  
read the contents into an object.  Seems like a job for RCurl but I  
have little experience and this seems like an odd case anyway.

By the way, I want to do this as a way to have several people on  
different computers run a .Rnw file that needs to access common data  
set w/o changing the path to the file each time a different person  
opens the file and works on it.  Perhaps there is another way of doing  
this.

Thanks for any suggestions.  Bryan
****************
Prof. Bryan Hanson
Dept of Chemistry & Biochemistry
DePauw University
Greencastle IN 46135 USA



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