How to determine if you have an internet connection in R

Question

Sometimes I need to download data from the internet. On occasions this has failed either because the website is down or because my computer has lost its internet connection.

Answer 1

This is a version of eyjo's answer which sacrifices accuracy for speed.

IPavailable <- function() {
  cmd <- switch(.Platform$OS.type, "windows" = "ipconfig", "ifconfig")
  any(grep("(\\d+(\\.|$)){4}", system(cmd, intern = TRUE)))
}