[R-SIG-Finance] Website authentication with R

[Ian Seow]

Hi guys, I'm currently running daily batch jobs to pull various data
from the web (using R CMD BATCH, in conjunction with cron jobs) and
then parsing them with R functions for stat analysis. However, I
recently encountered problems doing so on websites requiring
authentication. In Perl this would be done something like:
$ua->credentials( $netloc, $realm, $uname, $pass )..... Is there an
equivalent for this in R? I see that there is a HTTPUserAgent setting
in options( ), but unfortunately there's no username/password field.
Has anyone else encountered similar problems?

Thanks!

Best Regards
Ian Seow