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

[Timothy Bates]

The problem is that dropbox sharable links unpack to https URIs, and R doesn't support secture http (at least not on Mac, not sure about other platforms).


Would be great to compile the read.table etc. functions to use curl when it is installed, as curl supports a myriad of protocols.

Rcurl package seems to does this (but not on windows)

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RCurl/RCurl.pdf

If your friends all use dropbox, they can get a common local path with something like "~Dropbox/file.Rnw"

t

On 20 May 2011, at 19:05, Bryan Hanson wrote:

> 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.