Reputation: 1049

Access a URL and read Data with R

Is there a way I can specify and get data from a web site URL on to a CSV file for analysis using R?

Upvotes: 90

Answers (5)

Dirk is no longer here

Reputation: 368201

In the simplest case, just do

X <- read.csv(url("http://some.where.net/data/foo.csv"))

plus which ever options read.csv() may need.

Edit in Sep 2020 or 9 years later:

For a few years now R also supports directly passing the URL to read.csv:

X <- read.csv("http://some.where.net/data/foo.csv")

End of 2020 edit. Original post continutes.

Long answer: Yes this can be done and many packages have use that feature for years. E.g. the tseries packages uses exactly this feature to download stock prices from Yahoo! for almost a decade:

R> library(tseries)
Loading required package: quadprog
Loading required package: zoo

    ‘tseries’ version: 0.10-24

    ‘tseries’ is a package for time series analysis and computational finance.

    See ‘library(help="tseries")’ for details.

R> get.hist.quote("IBM")
trying URL 'http://chart.yahoo.com/table.csv?    ## manual linebreak here
  s=IBM&a=0&b=02&c=1991&d=5&e=08&f=2011&g=d&q=q&y=0&z=IBM&x=.csv'
Content type 'text/csv' length unknown
opened URL
.......... .......... .......... .......... ..........
.......... .......... .......... .......... ..........
.......... .......... .......... .......... ..........
.......... .......... .......... .......... ..........
.......... .......... .......... .......... ..........
........
downloaded 258 Kb

             Open   High    Low  Close
1991-01-02 112.87 113.75 112.12 112.12
1991-01-03 112.37 113.87 112.25 112.50
1991-01-04 112.75 113.00 111.87 112.12
1991-01-07 111.37 111.87 110.00 110.25
1991-01-08 110.37 110.37 108.75 109.00
1991-01-09 109.75 110.75 106.75 106.87
[...]

This is all exceedingly well documented in the manual pages for help(connection) and help(url). Also see the manul on 'Data Import/Export' that came with R.

Upvotes: 102

mpalanco

Reputation: 13570

base

read.csv without the url function just works fine. Probably I am missing something if Dirk Eddelbuettel included it in his answer:

ad <- read.csv("http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/Advertising.csv")
head(ad)

  X    TV radio newspaper sales
1 1 230.1  37.8      69.2  22.1
2 2  44.5  39.3      45.1  10.4
3 3  17.2  45.9      69.3   9.3
4 4 151.5  41.3      58.5  18.5
5 5 180.8  10.8      58.4  12.9
6 6   8.7  48.9      75.0   7.2

Another options using two popular packages:

data.table

library(data.table)
ad <- fread("http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/Advertising.csv")
head(ad)

V1    TV radio newspaper sales
1:  1 230.1  37.8      69.2  22.1
2:  2  44.5  39.3      45.1  10.4
3:  3  17.2  45.9      69.3   9.3
4:  4 151.5  41.3      58.5  18.5
5:  5 180.8  10.8      58.4  12.9
6:  6   8.7  48.9      75.0   7.2

readr

library(readr)
ad <- read_csv("http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/Advertising.csv")
head(ad)

# A tibble: 6 x 5
     X1    TV radio newspaper sales
  <int> <dbl> <dbl>     <dbl> <dbl>
1     1 230.1  37.8      69.2  22.1
2     2  44.5  39.3      45.1  10.4
3     3  17.2  45.9      69.3   9.3
4     4 151.5  41.3      58.5  18.5
5     5 180.8  10.8      58.4  12.9
6     6   8.7  48.9      75.0   7.2

Upvotes: 14

larkee

Reputation: 550

Beside of read.csv(url("...")) you also can use read.table("http://...").

Example:

> sample <- read.table("http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/examples/ara/angell.txt")
> sample
                V1   V2   V3   V4 V5
1        Rochester 19.0 20.6 15.0  E
2         Syracuse 17.0 15.6 20.2  E
...
43         Atlanta  4.2 70.6 32.6  S
>

Upvotes: 8