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getting R to download data

3 messages · sachinthaka.abeywardana at allianz.com.au, Ben Bolker, Greg Snow

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Hi All,

Is it possible to write a program such that it downloads a csv from a given
web address? Would be great if this could be done at a particular time
during the day as well. Say 9AM monday-friday.

Incase you are curious Im just trying to analyse some stocks data.

Thanks,
Sachin
p.s. sorry about corporate notice

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<sachinthaka.abeywardana <at> allianz.com.au> writes:
downloading a csv file is easy:

x <- read.csv(url("http://whatever.com/my.csv"))

  for scheduling this you probably want to use some scheduling
tool  that works with your OS (in Unix/Linux you would use
"cron") and run R in batch mode (R CMD BATCH ...)

  I suppose you could leave an R job running all the time, having
it go to sleep (?Sys.sleep) in between calls -- I don't know if
Sys.sleep(24*3600) would reliably put it to sleep for a whole day --
but scheduling through the operating system would certainly be
a better way to do it.
#
If you don't want to use the OS (windows does have a scheduling service) then I would suggest using the tools in tcltk and possibly tcltk2 (tclTaskSchedule).  They can have a delayed thing in the background so you can still use the R console, but the download will happen automatically.