zip - Using R to download gzipped data file, extract, and import data

Question

A follow up to this question: How can I download and uncompress a gzipped file using R? For example (from the UCI Machine Learning Repository), I have a file of insurance data. How can I download it using R?

Here is the data url: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/databases/tic/tic.tar.gz.

Answer 1

I like Ramnath's approach, but I would use temp files like so:

tmpdir <- tempdir()

url <- 'http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/databases/tic/tic.tar.gz'
file <- basename(url)
download.file(url, file)

untar(file, compressed = 'gzip', exdir = tmpdir )
list.files(tmpdir)

The list.files() should produce something like this:

[1] "TicDataDescr.txt" "dictionary.txt"   "ticdata2000.txt"  "ticeval2000.txt"  "tictgts2000.txt" 

which you could parse if you needed to automate this process for a lot of files.