I have used ?unzip
in the past to get at contents of a zipped file using R. This time around, I am having a hard time extracting the files from a .gz file which can be found here.
I have tried ?gzfile
and ?gzcon
but have not been able to get it to work. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Here is a worked example that may help illustrate what gzfile()
and gzcon()
are for
foo <- data.frame(a=LETTERS[1:3], b=rnorm(3))
foo
# a b
#1 A 0.586882
#2 B 0.218608
#3 C 1.290776
write.table(foo, file="/tmp/foo.csv")
system("gzip /tmp/foo.csv") # being very explicit
Now that the file is written, instead of implicit use of file()
, use gzfile()
:
read.table(gzfile("/tmp/foo.csv.gz"))
# a b
#1 A 0.586882
#2 B 0.218608
#3 C 1.290776
The file you point is a compressed tar archive, and as far as I know, R itself has no interface to tar archives. These are commonly used to distribute source code--as for example for R packages and R sources.