[R-pkg-devel] download.file and https

[Paul Gilbert]

On 07/02/2015 10:52 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
>  From R 3.2.0, check:
>
>> capabilities("libcurl")
> libcurl
>     TRUE
>
> TRUE means R was built such that HTTPS is supported.  If you see
> FALSE, make sure libcurl is available when/if you build R from source.

I do have TRUE for this. The default behaviour still does not work.

Paul

>
> /Henrik
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Paul Gilbert <pgilbert902 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> (This problem with download.file() affects quantmod, and possibly several
>> other packages. e.g. getSymbols('M2',src='FRED') fails.)
>>
>> I think the St Louis Fed has moved to using https for connections, and I
>> believe all the US government web sites are doing this. An http request is
>> automatically switched to https. The default download.file method does not
>> seem to handle this, but method="wget" does:
>>
>>>   tmp <- tempfile()
>>>
>>> download.file("http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2/downloaddata/M2.csv",
>>> destfile = tmp)
>> trying URL
>> 'http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2/downloaddata/M2.csv'
>> Error in
>> download.file("http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2/downloaddata/M2.csv",
>> :
>>    cannot open URL
>> 'http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2/downloaddata/M2.csv'
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> download.file("http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2/downloaddata/M2.csv",
>>> destfile = tmp, method="wget")
>> --2015-07-02 22:29:49--
>> http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2/downloaddata/M2.csv
>> Resolving research.stlouisfed.org (research.stlouisfed.org)... 65.89.18.120
>> Connecting to research.stlouisfed.org
>> (research.stlouisfed.org)|65.89.18.120|:80... connected.
>> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
>> Location:
>> https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2/downloaddata/M2.csv
>> [following]
>> --2015-07-02 22:29:49--
>> https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2/downloaddata/M2.csv
>> Connecting to research.stlouisfed.org
>> (research.stlouisfed.org)|65.89.18.120|:443... connected.
>> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
>> Length: unspecified [text/x-comma-separated-values]
>> Saving to: ‘/tmp/RtmpOX7kA1/file1ba639d7fd0f’
>>
>>      [ <=>                                   ] 34,519       178KB/s   in 0.2s
>>
>> 2015-07-02 22:29:50 (178 KB/s) - ‘/tmp/RtmpOX7kA1/file1ba639d7fd0f’ saved
>> [34519]
>>
>> Paul
>>
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