On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Gary Lewis <gary.m.le...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi - Many organizations now make their data available as XML via a > REST web service architecture. Is there any R package or facility to > access this type of data directly (eg, to make the HTTP GET request > and have the downloaded data put into an R data frame)? > > I used several R search sites to look for an answer, but came up with > very little. Any help would be appreciated.
You can (in many places) replace a filename with url(address) and R functions such as read.table will work. If the response is XML then getting the response into a data frame will be so dependent on the format then it's unlikely there's a generic solution. Specific solutions exist - for example my geonames package that queries the geonames server for geographic information: http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/geonames/ Note that instead of getting XML and having to parse that, it gets the JSON representation and use rjson to decode it - which saves a bit of weight since XML parsing is a bit heavy. I suspect that if SOAP and WSDL interfaces were more widely used then some of the R Omegahat projects might be more useful: http://www.omegahat.org/download/R/packages/ but it seems that informal service definitions via simple REST interfaces and XML responses are winning. Barry ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
