Public file access in R

[ChrisBollands]

Hi there,
Sorry if this isn't the right place for this, I couldn't find other contact details.
I'm working on some documentation for my company assisting with researchers connecting to cloudstor via different methods.
The python library for cloudstor allows the user to access public files files sent to them with a link and a password. I would like to be able to do document this for R as well, is this possible within cloudstoR? If not could this be considered for a later version?

Thanks in advance, Chris.

[tarensanders]

Hi Chris,

Sure, that looks simple enough to implement. I should be able to get to that in the next week or so.

Cheers,
Taren

[tarensanders]

@ChrisBollands I've opened a PR with these features. I still need to make some changes to the docs before I merge into master, and then it will probably go to CRAN a bit later in the year (I think I'll aim for October). In the meantime, I wonder if you'd be willing to test it? I don't really use public links all that often, and while all my tests pass I don't know how representative they are.

You can install with:

install.packages("devtools") # If you don't already have it
devtools::install_github("pdparker/cloudstoR#26")

Then load and use as usual.

The API is pretty simple:

• Put the full URL (as provided by cloudstor) as the path argument, and optionally provided password if the link requires one for cloud_get. E.g., cloud_get(MYURL, password = MYPASSWORD)
• The metadata that is returned for a single file does not have the extension, so it can't be automatically opened. If you provide a dest (e.g., dest = "mydata.csv"), it can be opened. Otherwise, you'll get a file path back for you to open as you like.
• If the URL is to a folder, cloud_get() will download all the files at the top level and return a vector of file paths. I could not find a good way to get the folder details, so at the moment it only works for the top-level folder. if you provide dest it needs to be a folder.