Loading datasets from the Internet

The most obvious task is to download datasets from the Web and load those into our R session in two manual steps:

1. Save the datasets to disk.

2. Read those with standard functions, such as read.table or for example foreign::read.spss, to import sav files.

But we can often save some time by skipping the first step and loading the flat text data files directly from the URL. The following example fetches a comma-separated file from the Americas Open Geocode (AOG) database at http://opengeocode.org, which contains the government, national statistics, geological information, and post office websites for the countries of the world:

> str(read.csv('http://opengeocode.org/download/CCurls.txt'))
'data.frame':  249 obs. of  5 variables:
 $ ISO.3166.1.A2                  : Factor w/ 248 levels "AD" ...
 $ Government.URL                 : Factor w/ 232 levels ""  ...
 $ National.Statistics.Census..URL: Factor w/ 213 levels ""  ...
 $ Geological.Information.URL     : Factor...