[R] Comment on loadURL: should default to mode="wb"

[Prof Brian Ripley]

A bit more explanation.

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On Fri, 18 Feb 2005, Seth Falcon wrote:
>
>> So the help for loadURL says:
>> 
>>     'loadURL' is a convenience wrapper which downloads a file, loads
>>     it and deletes the downloaded copy.
>> 
>> Trying to load an rda file on Windows (XP, R-devel) I was surprised
>> when I received an error about input being corrupted with LF
>> replaced by CR.

That *is* described on the help page for loadURL.

>> The fix was to specify mode="wb" to loadURL.  This gets passed to
>> download.file and the right thing happens...
>> 
>> On unix platforms it doesn't matter whether mode="w" or mode="wb".
>> 
>> Will loadURL ever do anything useful on Windows without passing
>> mode="wb"?  If not, I think changing the default (in loadURL) to
>> mode="wb" would be a nice improvement.

On Windows.

> Yes of course, as almost all Web files are text and the default is correct 
> for them.

That means ASCII=TRUE saves.  When loadURL was written, they could be 
transferred as text file.

> Why are you using an out-dated interface anyway?  See the examples for 
> loadURL!

The modern interface does work on Windows:

> load(url("http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/hills.rda"))

no error (and I have removed the file).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595