[R] Read from url requiring authentication?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2008, Damien wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking into opening an url on a server which requires
> authentication.
>
> After failing to find some kind of connection structure to fill in I
> turned to explicitly stating the credentials in the url itself (e.g.
> "http://username:pass@site.com").
> Sadly this didn't do the trick either and both source() and url()
> failed trying to resolve the username ()
>
> Is there anything I missed in the documentation/internet/groups?
> If not could I maybe add to the existing R functions as it doesn't
> seem too far of a stretch to allow the username and password in the
> url string fed to the web server?

Look at the RCurl package: it is more like download.file than url, though, 
and you could perhaps wse the "wget" method of download.file.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595