Thank you Avraham, .xlsx are zipped xml files so wb is required for it to be readable.
Kind regards Hernando ________________________________ From: R-devel <r-devel-boun...@r-project.org> on behalf of Avraham Adler <avraham.ad...@gmail.com> Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2025 2:52:49 PM To: Paul McQuesten <mcques...@gmail.com> Cc: R-devel <r-devel@r-project.org>; Hernando Cortina <h...@alum.mit.edu> Subject: Re: [Rd] Including mode='wb' in download.file() for .xlsx files on Windows ? If I recall correctly, xlsx files are XML. It is the xls/xlsb files which are binary. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-xlsx/2c5dee00-eff2-4b22-92b6-0738acd4475e Sent from my iPhone > On Aug 10, 2025, at 2:38 PM, Paul McQuesten <mcques...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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" >> >> … >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >> >> > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
