On Mon, 1 Jan 2007, Duncan Temple Lang wrote: > Kurt Hornik wrote: >>>>>>> Duncan Temple Lang writes: >> >>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >>> Hash: SHA1 >> >>> Prof Brian Ripley wrote: >>>> I've added to R-devel the ability to use download.file() and url() to >>>> https: URLs, *only* if --internet2 is used on Windows. >>>> >>>> This uses the Internet Explorer internals, and only works if the >>>> certificate is accepted (so e.g. does not work for >>>> https://svn.r-project.org). >>>> >>>> Now I use IE (and Windows for that matter) only when really necessary, and >>>> Firefox has simple ways to permanently accept non-verifiable certificates. >>>> I would be grateful if someone who is much more familiar with IE could >>>> write a note explaining how to deal with this that we could add to the >>>> rw-FAQ. >>>> >>>> To forestall the inevitable question: there are no plans to add https: >>>> support on any other platform, but it is something that would make a nice >>>> project for a user contribution. The current internal code is based on >>>> likxml2, and that AFAICS still does not have https: support. >>>> >> >>> Generally (i.e. not in particular response to Brian but related to >>> this thread) >> >> With a similar disclaimer: Brian's efforts were triggered by me asking >> how to use url() to read R's mailing list archive files, such as >> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2007-January.txt.gz >> >> directly into R. Turns out we cannot ... which, in a way, is a shame >> ("R cannot read its own web pages") :-( > > Indeed, it is a shame. Although, when I process mail messages, > I use Perl's very rich collection of modules for processing > mail in so many different formats. And then I use RSPerl > to control this and get the data into R pretty quickly. > So we can do it in R and probably the delegation to > mail-processing software is a good given the number of special > cases, etc. > > And even if we had HTTPs in R, we would still want to deal with > the certificate on that page, which gets us to more details. > Which is the reason I think leaving things to libcurl, > libwww, etc. will be best as they continue to evolve > to handle new protocols and settings.
The issue here is the same as it ever was, that of event-loops and not blocking the R process. I think that is where the missing extensibility is, and it has been raised for at least 6 years now. If I try to get that example URI with RCurl it 1) blocks the R process for a long time. 2) fails to retrieve the URI as it is unable to handle the certificate. Can you please point us to an extension package that behaves better? [When Kurt first sent me the example, I was surprised that wget handled it. I then checked, and wget < 1.10 does not check certificates at all.] -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
