CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
user1478335
user1478335

Reputation: 1839

Using R, import data from web

I have just started using R, so this may be a very dumb question. I am trying to import the data using:

emdata=read.csv(file="http://lottery.merseyworld.com/cgi-bin/lottery?days=19&Machine=Z&Ballset=0&order=1&show=1&year=0&display=CSV",header=TRUE)

My problem is that it reads the csv file into a single column ( by the way, the lottery data is simply because it is publicly available to download - using as an exercise to understand what I can and can't do in R), instead of formatting it into however many columns of data there are. Would someone mind helping out, please, even though this is trivial

Upvotes: 3

Views: 5464

Answers (2)

fotNelton
fotNelton

Reputation: 3894

You could read text from the given url, filter out the obnoxious lines and then read the result as CSV like so:

lines <- readLines(url("http://lottery.merseyworld.com/cgi-bin/lottery?days=19&Machine=Z&Ballset=0&order=1&show=1&year=0&display=CSV"))
read.csv(text=lines[grep("([^,]*,){5,}", lines)])

The above regular expression matches any lines containing at least five commas.

Upvotes: 0

Hong Ooi
Hong Ooi

Reputation: 57686

Hm, that's kind of obnoxious for a page purporting to be in csv format. You can skip the first 5 lines, which will cause R to read (most of) the rest of the file correctly.

emdata=read.csv(file=...., header=TRUE, skip=5)

I got the number of lines to skip by looking at the source. You'll still have to remove the cruft in the middle and end, and then clean up the columns (they'll all be factors because of the embedded text).

It would be much easier to save the page to your hard disk, edit it to remove all the useless bits, then import it.

... to answer your REAL question, yes, you can import data directly from the web. In general, wherever you would read a file, you can substitute a fully qualified URL -- R is smart enough to do the Right Thing[tm]. This specific URL just happens to be particularly messy.

Upvotes: 4

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