[R] Reading file from remote location or network drive.

[Harsh]

Hello,

I'm trying to pull data from a network drive on a windows machine. The
location is read into a string <rem> and then used later with a data
input command.

> rem<- "\\192.192.192.3\Shared\iris1.csv"
Warning messages:
1: '\S' is an unrecognized escape in a character string
2: '\i' is an unrecognized escape in a character string
3: unrecognized escapes removed from "\\192.168.16.3\Shared\iris1.csv"

When using a data input operation

datafile<- read.csv(rem,header= T, sep = ",")
Error in file(file, "r") : cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In file(file, "r") :
  cannot open file '\192.192.192.3Sharediris1.csv': No such file or directory

I have tried to use strsplit to split on "\\"

> strsplit(rem,"\\")
Error in strsplit(rem, "\\") : invalid split pattern '\'
In addition: Warning message:
In strsplit(rem, "\\") : regcomp error:  'Trailing backslash'

Also, I tried to split to extract all characters and this is what I obtained.

> print(strsplit(rem,""))
[[1]]
 [1] "\\" "1"  "9"  "2"  "."  "1"  "6"  "8"  "."  "1"  "6"  "."  "3"  "S"  "h"
[16] "a"  "r"  "e"  "d"  "i"  "r"  "i"  "s"  "1"  "."  "c"  "s"  "v"


The problem is that, I cannot check for each character and if "\",
convert it to "/".

Ofcourse, if I were to assign

> rem<- "//192.192.192.3/Shared/iris1.csv"

Then rem can be used successfully
> datafile<- read.csv(rem,header= T, sep = ",")

Alternately, I would like to know, if the network drive were to have a
username and password,
how would I be able to pass those parameters in read.csv below

datafile<- read.csv("\\192.168.16.3\Shared\iris1.csv username:user
password:user",header= T, sep = ",")


Thank you,

Harsh Singhal
Mu Sigma Decision Systems Inc.,
Chicago, IL
USA