gunzip a file stream in R?

Question

I'm trying to create an R API for StackOverflow. The output is gzipped. For example:

readLines("http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/stats/", warn=F)
[1] "\037‹\b"                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
[2] "\030\002úØÛy°óé½\036„iµXäË–[<üt—Zu[\\VmÎHî=ÜÛݹ×ýz’Í.äûû÷>ý´\a\177Ýh÷\017îÝÛÙwßÚáÿþ«¼þý\027ÅrÝæÔlgüÀëA±\017›ìŽï{M¤û.\020\037�Ë\"¿’\006³ì\032„Úß9¸ÿ`¼ç÷³*~ÿKêˆð¡\006v¦ð²ýô£�ñÃ�ì+ôU�_\026滽�]êt¼·?ÞûÈ4ù%\016~S0^>àe¶ÀG\037½n³éÛôKê缬®‚\016Êê¢úý×u‰fó¶]=º{·aΚŽ—y{·©î\026‹‹»h5^-/‚W1 |9[UŲõ^§�Ç"
[3] ":¬´¿1M\177ð\"0íö¹ñ…YÞLëbÕ*!~â\027\036§çU�®êê¢ÎˆµhòýæÅ´Zn\036S¶Z•ùv[­§óm´î�"                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
[4] "Í™t˪^d¥£·üÂ?¾ÿ\033'¿$ù\177"  

Is there a good way to gunzip this in R, short of writing the output to file, gunzip'ing it, and reading it back in?

Answer 1

You could do:

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

Answer 2

Try:

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

Answer 3

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")