Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:08:48 -0800
From: spector at stat.berkeley.edu
To: zack_holden at hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [R] download/retain text file structure with RCurl/getURL()
Zack -
Here's a start:
txtfile = getURL('ftp://ftp.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/data/snow/snow_course/table/history/idaho/13e19.txt',ftp.use.epsv = FALSE)
txtvec = strsplit(txtfile,'\n')[[1]]
widths = c(4,rep(c(5,4,6),6))
res = read.fwf(textConnection(txtvec[9:65]),widths=widths,stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
nums = c(3,4,6,7,9,10,12,13,15,16,18,19)
res[,nums] = sapply(res[,nums],as.numeric)
Hope this helps.
- Phil Spector
Statistical Computing Facility
Department of Statistics
UC Berkeley
spector at stat.berkeley.edu
On Mon, 19 Jan 2009, zack holden wrote:
Dear list,
I'm trying to download a text file directly from the internet using the RCurl package and the command getURL. Duncan Lang graciously helped me solve the first step in this problem using the following command:
#################
txtfile <- getURL('ftp://ftp.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/data/snow/snow_course/table/history/idaho/13e19.txt',
ftp.use.epsv = FALSE)
#################
This brings the text file into R in a single long character string. I've spent many hours now trying to bring this text file into R into a sensible form. I've tried every variant of different commands in getURL help file, as well as different
strsplit() commands to try to break this character string into a sensible rows and columns, to no avail.
Can anyone suggest a solution for doing this? I suspect there is a getURL command I'm missing. Alternatively, do I really have to break this long character string into rows and columns that I can then assemble into a table?
I'd be grateful for any advice.
Thanks in advance,
Zack