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
- Create a temp. file name (eg
tempfile()
) - Use
download.file()
to fetch the file into the temp. file - Use
unz()
to extract the target file from temp. file - 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 🙂