No problem, you can also  get the directory with a curlOption of dirlistonly

see the example code in the package. This will depend on the version of
libcurl that you have.

If you have an older version, my code will get you the directory.

>From the Rcurl examples:

the files within a directory.
url = '
ftp://ftp.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/data/snow/snow_course/table/history/idaho/'
filenames = getURL(url, ftp.use.epsv = FALSE, dirlistonly = TRUE)

  # Deal with newlines as \n or \r\n. (BDR)
  # Or alternatively, instruct libcurl to change \n's to \r\n's for us with
crlf = TRUE
  # filenames = getURL(url, ftp.use.epsv = FALSE, ftplistonly = TRUE, crlf =
TRUE)
filenames = paste(url, strsplit(filenames, "\r*\n")[[1]], sep = "")
con = getCurlHandle( ftp.use.epsv = FALSE)
contents = sapply(filenames[1:5], getURL, curl = con)
names(contents) = filenames[1:length(contents)]


On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Baoqiang Cao <bqcaomail@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Steven!
> It is excellent code indeed!
>
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:26 AM, steven mosher <moshersteven@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >  I would use RCurl.
> >
> >  if you have, for example, the url of an ftp site you can merely do a
> > getURL() and the contents will be returned. That call will return data
> that
> > can be coerced into a data.frame that will look like a directory
> structure
> > listing the file names.
> >
> > If you need code just ask, but the RCurl docs are pretty good.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 8:10 AM, Baoqiang Cao <bqcaomail@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I'd like to download some data files from a remote server, the problem
> >> here is that some of the files actually don't exist, which I don't
> >> know before try. Just wondering if a function in R could tell me if a
> >> file exists on a remote server? I searched this mailing list and after
> >> read severals mails, still clueless.  Any help will be highly
> >> appreciated.
> >>
> >> B.C.
> >>
> >> ______________________________________________
> >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> >> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> >> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> >
> >
>

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