Working with online data and services
With growing amounts of data available from web-based sources, it is increasingly important for machine learning projects to be able to access and interact with online services. R is able to read data from online sources natively, with some caveats. First, by default, R cannot access secure websites (those using https://
rather than the http://
protocol). Secondly, it is important to note that most web pages do not provide data in a form that R can understand. The data will need to be parsed, or broken apart and rebuilt into a structured form before it can be useful. We'll discuss the workarounds shortly.
However, if neither of these caveats apply, that is, if the data are already online in a non-secure website and in a tabular form like CSV that R can understand natively, then R's read.csv()
and read.table()
functions can access it from the web just as if it were on your local machine. Simply supply the full Uniform Resource Locator ...