Here John,

from the manual

URLs

A note on file:// URLs. The most general form (from RFC1738) is
file://host/path/to/file, but R only accepts the form with an empty host
field referring to the local machine. This is then file:///path/to/file,
where path/to/file is relative to ‘/’. So although the third slash is
strictly part of the specification not part of the path, this can be
regarded as a way to specify the file ‘/path/to/file’. It is not possible to
specify a relative path using a file URL.

No attempt is made to decode an encoded URL: call URLdecode if necessary.

Note that https:// connections are not supported.

So, when you use a https Url as opposed to a http url the former is not
supported.

You might try RCurl package

getURL()

which has support for HTTPS, provided your libcurl has support for SSL ( as
I recall)


On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 11:53 AM, John Kane <jrkrideau@yahoo.ca> wrote:

> #   Can anyone suggest why this works
>
> datafilename <- "
> http://personality-project.org/r/datasets/maps.mixx.epi.bfi.data"
> person.data  <- read.table(datafilename,header=TRUE)
>
> # but this does not?
>
> dd <- "
> https://sites.google.com/site/jrkrideau/home/general-stores/trees.txt"
> treedata <- read.table(dd, header=TRUE)
>
> ===================================================================
>
> Error in file(file, "rt") : cannot open the connection
> In addition: Warning message:
> In file(file, "rt") : unsupported URL scheme
>
> # I can access both through a hyperlink in OOO Calc. t
> #  Thanks
>
> ______________________________________________
> 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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