Hello all, regarding download.file():
On Windows, if mode is not supplied (missing()) and url ends in one of
‘.gz’, ‘.bz2’, ‘.xz’, ‘.tgz’, ‘.zip’, ‘.jar’, ‘.rda’,
‘.rds’, ‘.RData’ or ‘.pdf’, mode = "wb" is set so that a binary
transfer is done to help unwary users.
May I suggest possibly including .xlsx files to the list of extensions
that get this treatment?
Downloading such files may be a quite common activity in the R
community and having to manually add mode=”wb” may indeed catch
Windows users unaware, particularly if they are coming from Linux or
Mac where this is not necessary.
I understand that it’s hard to know when to stop when adding
additional extensions. That said, .xlsx is quite ubiquitous in the
wild and standardized under ECMA-376.
I hope this might be helpful to others, and thank you for your consideration.
Hernando
---------------
The change in src/library/utils/R/Windows/download.file.R would be:
…
if(missing(mode) && length(grep("\\.(gz|bz2|xz|tgz|zip|jar|rd[as]|RData|xlsx)$",
URLdecode(url))))
mode <- "wb"
…
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