Skip to content
Prev 4920 / 12125 Next

[R-pkg-devel] CRAN rules re. web scraping?

Hi Spencer:

I think that message means what it says,  and I read it as pretty straightforward and business like.  The issue is not web scraping.  There are two errors here:

1.  You can not write to the user's space without first explicitly asking permission of the user.   The suggested policy is to write to a temp directory,  R has tempdir() and related commands for how to do this.

2.  When accessing something over the internet,  failure of the access must be checked for and the program exiting gracefully.  The second error appears to be that at times on the builds the .csv file is not downloaded,  but there is no check,  just an error is thrown.  There are a number of ways to catch such errors,  such as "try...catch"  which will solve this problem

HTH,

-Roy
**********************
"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or NOAA."
**********************
Roy Mendelssohn
Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
NOAA/NMFS
Environmental Research Division
Southwest Fisheries Science Center
***Note new street address***
110 McAllister Way
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Phone: (831)-420-3666
Fax: (831) 420-3980
e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn at noaa.gov www: https://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/

"Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill."
"From those who have been given much, much will be expected" 
"the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK Jr.