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

RCurl::url.exists works for localhost (where ping doesn't always) and is faster than RCurl::getURL.

> library(RCurl)
> url.exists("google.com")
[1] TRUE
> url.exists("localhost:8888")
[1] TRUE
> url.exists("localhost:8012")
[1] FALSE

Note that it is possible to set the timeout (which by default is rather long)

> url.exists("google.com", timeout = 5) # timeout in seconds
[1] TRUE