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Answer 1

+6 A:

You could do:

conn <- gzcon(url("http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/stats/"))
data <- readLines(conn)

nico 2010-06-27 19:54:07

Thanks! Don't forget to close the connection when you're finished.

Shane 2010-06-27 20:13:45

Why double `readLines` is needed? [mbq answer](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3128422/gunzip-a-file-stream-in-r/3128738#3128738) works too.

Marek 2010-06-28 08:19:23

@Marek: corrected. That was just me trying different things and I must have pasted some extra command. Thanks for pointing that out.

nico 2010-06-28 11:08:31

Answer 2

+3 A:

Try:

p <- gzcon(url("http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/stats/"))
readLines(p)

mbq 2010-06-27 20:09:16

Answer 3

+3 A:

Ideally we should tell the server that we can handle gzipped content, find out from the HTTP headers that the content is actually gzip encoded and then decompress only if it is. The Rcurl library can do this:

library(Rcurl)
getURL("http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/stats/",
       .opts=list(encoding="identity,gzip")

Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya 2010-06-28 04:37:28

That's would be the right way to do it, but be aware that the Stack Overflow API team has [decided against obeying the HTTP protocol](http://stackapps.com/questions/729) in this regard; slightly related we won't see [proper HTTP/1.1 cache control](http://stackapps.com/questions/1028) for the time being as well ...

Steffen Opel 2010-07-10 08:17:14

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gunzip a file stream in R?

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