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repmis (version 0.2.5)

source_GitHubData: Load plain-text data from GitHub

Description

source_GitHubData loads plain-text formatted data stored on GitHub (and other secure-https-websites) into R. NOTE: this command is depricated. Use source_data instead.

Usage

source_GitHubData(url, sha1 = NULL, sep = ",",
    header = TRUE)

Arguments

url
The plain-text formatted data's RAW URL.
sha1
Character string of the file's SHA-1 hash, generated by source_data.
sep
The separator method for the data. By default sep = "," to load comma-separated values data (CSV). To load tab-separated values data (TSV) use sep = "t".
header
whether or not the first line of the file is the header (i.e. variable names). The default is header = TRUE

Value

  • a data frame

source

Based on source_url from the Hadley Wickham's devtools package.

Details

Loads plain-text data (e.g. CSV, TSV) data from GitHub into R. The function is basically the same as source_data, but with defaults choosen to make loading CSV files easier. Note: the GitHub URL you give for the url argument must be for the RAW version of the file. The function should work to download plain-text data from any secure URL (https), though I have not verified this.

From the source_url documentation: "If a SHA-1 hash is specified with the sha1 argument, then this function will check the SHA-1 hash of the downloaded file to make sure it matches the expected value, and throw an error if it does not match. If the SHA-1 hash is not specified, it will print a message displaying the hash of the downloaded file. The purpose of this is to improve security when running remotely-hosted code; if you have a hash of the file, you can be sure that it has not changed."

See Also

httr and read.table

Examples

Run this code
# Download electoral disproportionality data stored on GitHub
# Note: Using shortened URL created by bitly
DisData <- source_GitHubData("http://bit.ly/Ss6zDO")

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