How to download multiple files using loop in R?

Question

I have to download multiple xlsx files about a country's census data from internet using R. Files are located in this Link .The problems are:

1. I am unable to write a loop which will let me go back and forth to download
2. File being download has some weird name not districts name. So how can I change it to districts name dynamically.

I have used the below mentioned codes: url<-"http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011census/HLO/HL_PCA/HH_PCA1/HLPCA-28532-2011_H14_census.xlsx" download.file(url, "HLPCA-28532-2011_H14_census.xlsx", mode="wb")

But this downloads one file at a time and doesnt change the file name.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Assuming you want all the data without knowing all of the urls, your questing involves webparsing. Package httr provides useful function for retrieving HTML-code of a given website, which you can parse for links.

Maybe this bit of code is what you're looking for:

library(httr)

base_url = "http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011census/HLO/" # main website
r <- GET(paste0(base_url, "HL_PCA/Houselisting-housing-HLPCA.html"))
rc = content(r, "text")
rcl = unlist(strsplit(rc, "<a href =\\\""))   # find links
rcl = rcl[grepl("Houselisting-housing-.+?\\.html", rcl)]  # find links to houslistings

names = gsub("^.+?>(.+?)</.+$", "\\1",rcl)              # get names
names = gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$", "", names)          # trim names
links = gsub("^(Houselisting-housing-.+?\\.html).+$", "\\1",rcl)  # get links

# iterate over regions
for(i in 1:length(links)) {
    url_hh = paste0(base_url, "HL_PCA/", links[i])
    if(!url_success(url_hh)) next

    r <- GET(url_hh)
    rc = content(r, "text")
    rcl = unlist(strsplit(rc, "<a href =\\\""))   # find links
  rcl = rcl[grepl(".xlsx", rcl)]  # find links to houslistings

    hh_names = gsub("^.+?>(.+?)</.+$", "\\1",rcl)          # get names
    hh_names = gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$", "", hh_names)          # trim names
    hh_links = gsub("^(.+?\\.xlsx).+$", "\\1",rcl)   # get links

    # iterate over subregions
    for(j in 1:length(hh_links)) {
        url_xlsx = paste0(base_url, "HL_PCA/",hh_links[j])
      if(!url_success(url_xlsx)) next

        filename = paste0(names[i], "_", hh_names[j], ".xlsx")
        download.file(url_xlsx, filename, mode="wb")
    }
}