data manipulation - Read a CSV from github into R

Question

I am trying to read a CSV from github into R:

latent.growth.data <- read.csv("https://github.com/aronlindberg/latent_growth_classes/blob/master/LGC_data.csv")

However, this gives me:

Error in file(file, "rt") : cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In file(file, "rt") : unsupported URL scheme

I tried ?read.csv, ?download.file, getURL (which only returned strange HTML), as well as the data import manual, but still cannot understand how to make it work.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Try this:

library(RCurl)
x <- getURL("https://raw.github.com/aronlindberg/latent_growth_classes/master/LGC_data.csv")
y <- read.csv(text = x)

You have two problems:

1. You're not linking to the "raw" text file, but Github's display version (visit the URL for https: aw.github.com....csv to see the difference between the raw version and the display version).
2. https is a problem for R in many cases, so you need to use a package like RCurl to get around it. In some cases (not with Github, though) you can simply replace https with http and things work out, so you can always try that out first, but I find using RCurl reliable and not too much extra typing.