Question

I wish to use read.csv to read a google doc spreadsheet.

I try using the following code:

data_url <- "http://spreadsheets0.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0AgMhDTVek_sDdGI2YzY2R1ZESDlmZS1VYUxvblQ0REE&single=true&gid=0&output=csv"
read.csv(data_url)

Which results in the following error:

Error in file(file, "rt") : cannot open the connection

I’m on windows 7. And the code was tried on R 2.12 and 2.13

I remember trying this a few months ago and it worked fine.
Any suggestion what might be causing this or how to solve it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem and eventually found a solution in a forum thread. Using my own public CSV file:

library(RCurl)
tt = getForm("https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub", 
          hl ="en_US", key = "0Aonsf4v9iDjGdHRaWWRFbXdQN1ZvbGx0LWVCeVd0T1E", 
          output = "csv", 
         .opts = list(followlocation = TRUE, verbose = TRUE, ssl.verifypeer = FALSE)) 

holidays <- read.csv(textConnection(tt))