Now that the whole world is clambering to use SSL all the time (a decision that makes a lot of sense) some of us who have used github and related services to store csv files have a little bit of a challenge. The read.csv() function does not support SSL when reading from a URL. To get around this I'm doing a little dance I like to call the SSL kabuki dance. I grab the text file with RCurl, write it to a temp file, then read it with read.csv(). Is there a smoother way of doing this? Better work-arounds?
Here's a simple example of the SSL kabuki:
require(RCurl)
myCsv <- getURL("https://gist.github.com/raw/667867/c47ec2d72801cfd84c6320e1fe37055ffe600c87/test.csv")
temporaryFile <- tempfile()
con <- file(temporaryFile, open = "w")
cat(myCsv, file = con)
close(con)
read.csv(temporaryFile)
Answer
No need to write it to a file - just use textConnection()
require(RCurl)
myCsv <- getURL("https://gist.github.com/raw/667867/c47ec2d72801cfd84c6320e1fe37055ffe600c87/test.csv")
WhatJDwants <- read.csv(textConnection(myCsv))