The R-help mailing list

R-help is the official, main mailing list providing general discussion about problems and solutions using R, with many active users and several dozen e-mails every day. Fortunately, this public mailing list is archived on several sites, and we can easily download the compressed monthly files from, for example, ETH Zurich's R-help archives:

> library(RCurl)
> url <- getURL('https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/')

Now let's extract the URL of the monthly compressed archives from this page via an XPath query:

> R.help.toc <- htmlParse(url)
> R.help.archives <- unlist(xpathApply(R.help.toc,
+      "//table//td[3]/a", xmlAttrs), use.names = FALSE)

And now let's download these files to our computer for future parsing:

> dir.create('r-help')
> for (f in R.help.archives)
+     download.file(url = paste0(url, f),
+          file.path('help-r', f), method = 'curl'))

Note

Depending on your...