Ping a website in R

Question

I would like to create a script in R that pings a given website. I haven\'t found any information about this specific for R.

To start with, all I need is the informa

Answer 1

We can use a system2 call to get the return status of the ping command in the shell. On Windows (and probably linux) following will work :

ping <- function(x, stderr = FALSE, stdout = FALSE, ...){
    pingvec <- system2("ping", x,
                       stderr = FALSE,
                       stdout = FALSE,...)
    if (pingvec == 0) TRUE else FALSE
}

# example
> ping("google.com")
[1] FALSE
> ping("ugent.be")
[1] TRUE

If you want to capture the output of ping, you can either set stdout = "", or use a system call:

> X <- system("ping ugent.be", intern = TRUE)
> X
 [1] ""                                                         "Pinging ugent.be [157.193.43.50] with 32 bytes of data:" 
 [3] "Reply from 157.193.43.50: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=62"       "Reply from 157.193.43.50: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=62"      
 [5] "Reply from 157.193.43.50: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=62"       "Reply from 157.193.43.50: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=62"      
 [7] ""                                                         "Ping statistics for 157.193.43.50:"                      
 [9] "    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss)," "Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:"          
[11] "    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms"         

using the option intern = TRUE makes it possible to save the output in a vector. I leave it to the reader as an exercise to rearrange this in order to get some decent output.