How can I read a table from a URL and keep it as a dataframe?

user_8874624 0
Viewed 3086

I have problems with the function read.table. I want to read a table from an url, and keep it in R as a dataframe. The url is: https://datanalytics.com/uploads/datos_treemap.txt

I have wrote this code:

library(RCurl)

a <- getURL('https://datanalytics.com/uploads/datos_treemap.txt')
b = read.table(a, sep="\t ", header = TRUE, nrows=3)

download.file("https://datanalytics.com/uploads/datos_treemap.txt","/mnt/M/Ana/R/datos_treemap.txt",method = c("wget"))

But I can't keep the data as a dataframe, and it results in the following error:

Error in file(file, "rt") : cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In file(file, "rt") : cannot open file...
No such file or directory

I have also tried to download the document as a txt, and keep it in mi PC. But the generate txt results in a vector instead of a table (all the results are in one unic row). The code I have wrote is:

download.file("https://datanalytics.com/uploads/datos_treemap.txt","/mnt/M/Ana/R/datos_treemap.txt",method = c("wget"))

What am I doing wrong?

read.table dataframe r url
2 Answers
library(RCurl)
a <- getURL('https://datanalytics.com/uploads/datos_treemap.txt')
b <- read.table(text=a, header = TRUE)
user_82405610

Here another solution using rvestinstead of RCurl. I do not want to judge which package is "better", just wanted to show an additional option, although, in your simple case rvest seems to be more verbose and you need SelectorGadget to identify the desired node (please anybody correct me if I am wrong and the code can be shortened).

library(rvest)

table <- read_html("https://datanalytics.com/uploads/datos_treemap.txt") %>% 
         html_text("p") %>% 
         { read.table(text = ., header = T) }
user_49078920
Related