How to webscrape secured pages in R (https links) (using readHTMLTable from XML package)?

Question

There are good answers on SO about how to use readHTMLTable from the XML package and I did that with regular http pages, however I am not able to solve my problem with https

Answer 1

This is the function I have to deal with this problem. Detects if https in url and uses httr if it is.

readHTMLTable2=function(url, which=NULL, ...){
 require(httr)
 require(XML)
 if(str_detect(url,"https")){
    page <- GET(url, user_agent("httr-soccer-ranking"))
    doc = htmlParse(text_content(page))
    if(is.null(which)){
      tmp=readHTMLTable(doc, ...)
      }else{
        tableNodes = getNodeSet(doc, "//table")
        tab=tableNodes[[which]]
        tmp=readHTMLTable(tab, ...) 
      }
  }else{
    tmp=readHTMLTable(url, which=which, ...) 
  }
  return(tmp)
}