Using R to download zipped data file, extract, and import data

Question

@EZGraphs on Twitter writes: \"Lots of online csvs are zipped. Is there a way to download, unzip the archive, and load the data to a data.frame using R? #Rstats\"

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Answer 1

Zip archives are actually more a 'filesystem' with content metadata etc. See help(unzip) for details. So to do what you sketch out above you need to

1. Create a temp. file name (eg tempfile())
2. Use download.file() to fetch the file into the temp. file
3. Use unz() to extract the target file from temp. file
4. Remove the temp file via unlink()

which in code (thanks for basic example, but this is simpler) looks like

temp <- tempfile()
download.file("http://www.newcl.org/data/zipfiles/a1.zip",temp)
data <- read.table(unz(temp, "a1.dat"))
unlink(temp)

Compressed (.z) or gzipped (.gz) or bzip2ed (.bz2) files are just the file and those you can read directly from a connection. So get the data provider to use that instead :)