10 Apr 2013

Download Files from Dropbox Programmatically with R

Here is a usefull snippet that I stole from qdap::url_dl to download files from my Dropbox to the working directory.
Argument x is the document name and d the document key.

dl_from_dropbox <- function(x, key) {
                        require(RCurl)
                        bin <- getBinaryURL(paste0("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/", key, "/", x),
                                            ssl.verifypeer = FALSE)
                        con <- file(x, open = "wb")
                        writeBin(bin, con)
                        close(con)
                        message(noquote(paste(x, "read into", getwd())))                        
                        }
# Example:
dl_from_dropbox("GViewer_Embeds.txt", "06fqlz6gswj80nj")
shell.exec("GViewer_Embeds.txt")
PS: Also see this R-package for interfacing with Dropbox

4 comments :

  1. Do you know how can I upload file to dropbox using R? I would be very grateful for help.

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  2. Check this: https://github.com/karthikram/rDrop

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  3. Thanks for pointing this out! I had been wondering about this for awhile. I modified it a bit to create a function for downloading plain-text data into R: http://christophergandrud.blogspot.com/2013/04/dropbox-r-data.html

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    Replies
    1. Thanks in return for your informative blog-article on Dropbox - I very much enjoyed reading it! And I'm keen to check the repmis package!

      Regards,
      Kay

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