Perhaps it would be simpler, and more future-proof, for R to always
download as binary.
Are there any modern consumers of text files that are bothered by '\r\n'?
Or even Macintosh '\r' line terminators?
On Sun, Aug 10, 2025 at 1:22 PM Hernando Cortina <h...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Yes, .docx and .pptx are part of the same specification.
>
>
>
> Kind regards
>
> Hernando
>
>
>
> *From: *Paul McQuesten <mcques...@gmail.com>
> *Date: *Sunday, August 10, 2025 at 1:34 PM
> *To: *Hernando Cortina <h...@alum.mit.edu>
> *Subject: *Re: [Rd] Including mode='wb' in download.file() for .xlsx
> files on Windows ?
>
> IIUC, '.docx' files are also binary?
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 10, 2025 at 11:29 AM Hernando Cortina <hcortin...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> 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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