Overcoming "Error: unexpected input" in RCurl - r

I am trying and failing to use RCurl to automate the process of fetching a spreadsheet from a web site, China Labour Bulletin's Strike Map.
Here is the URL for the spreadsheet with the options set as I'd like them:
http://strikemap.clb.org.hk/strikes/api.v4/export?FromYear=2011&FromMonth=1&ToYear=2015&ToMonth=6&_lang=en
Here is the code I'm using:
library(RCurl)
temp <- tempfile()
temp <- getForm("http://strikemap.clb.org.hk/strikes/api.v4/export",
FromYear="2011", FromMonth="1",
ToYear="2015", ToMonth="6",
_lang="en")
And here is the error message I get in response:
Error: unexpected input in:
" ToYear=2015, ToMonth=6,
_"
Any suggestions on how to get this to work?

Try enclosing _lang with a backtick.
temp <- getForm("http://strikemap.clb.org.hk/strikes/api.v4/export",
FromYear="2011",
FromMonth="1",
ToYear="2015",
ToMonth="6",
`_lang`="en")
I think R has trouble on the argument starting with an underscore. This seems to have worked for me.

Related

Encountered error when extracting outlook email body with RDCOMClient

I am trying to extract the body of a few outlook emails with their email subject containing the keyword "Permission" using RDCOMClient in R.
This is the code that I have written.
OutApp <- COMCreate("Outlook.Application")
OutlookNameSpace <- OutApp$GetNameSpace("MAPI")
folderName <- "Inbox"
search <- OutApp$AdvancedSearch(folderName, "urn:schemas:httpmail:subject like '%Permission%'")
results <- search$Results()
body <- c()
for (i in 1:results$Count()){
body <- c(body, results$Item(i)$Body())
}
When I ran the codes line by line, I am able to obtain the character vector body without error.
However, when I ran the entire chunk together, an error is encountered.
< CheckErrorInfo > 80020009
No support for InterfaceSupportsErrorInfo
CheckErrorInfo -2147352567
Error: Exception occurred.
I had tried adding Sys.sleep(1) as suggested in Running Excel macros from R through RDCOMClient, error -2147418111, both outside and inside the for loop, but I still get the same error.
Ultimately, I would like to run this script automatically using source( ).
Could someone please help me understand why this error has occurred, and how do I resolve it?
In addition, if I would like to access a shared inbox instead of my personal inbox, how should I change the folderName so that the search will be done in the correct mailbox?
Thank you!

Problems parsing StreamR JSON data

I am attempting to use the streamR in R to download and analyze Twitter, under the pretense that this library can overcome the limitations from the twitteR package.
When downloading data everything seems to work fabulously, using the filterStream function (just to clarify, the function captures Twitter data, just running it will provide the json file -saved in the working directory- that needs to be used in further steps):
filterStream( file.name="tweets_test.json",
track="NFL", tweets=20, oauth=credential, timeout=10)
Capturing tweets...
Connection to Twitter stream was closed after 10 seconds with up to 21 tweets downloaded.
However, when moving on to parse the json file, I keep getting all sorts of errors:
readTweets("tweets_test.json", verbose = TRUE)
0 tweets have been parsed.
list()
Warning message:
In readLines(tweets) : incomplete final line found on 'tweets_test.json'
Or with this function from the same package:
tweet_df <- parseTweets(tweets='tweets_test.json')
Error in `$<-.data.frame`(`*tmp*`, "country_code", value = NA) :
replacement has 1 row, data has 0
In addition: Warning message:
In stream_in_int(path.expand(path)) : Parsing error on line 0
I have tried reading the json file with jsonlite and rjson with the same results.
Originally, it seemed that the error came from special characters ({, then \) within the json file that I tried to clean up following the suggestion from this post, however, not much came out of it.
I found out about the streamR package from this post, which shows the process as very straight forward and simple (which it is, except for the parsing part!).
If any of you have experience with this library and/or these parsing issues, I'd really appreciate your input. I have been searching non stop but haven't been able to locate a solution.
Thanks!

Difficulty opening a package data file of unknown type

I am trying to load the state map from the maps package into an R object. I am hoping it is a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame or something I can turn into one after I have inspected it. However I am failing at the first step – getting it into an R object. I do not know the file type.
I first tried to assign the map() output to an R object directly:
st_m <- maps::map(database = "state")
draws the map, but str(st_m) appears to do nothing, unless it is redrawing the same map.
Then I tried loading it as a dataset: st_m <- data("stateMapEnv", package="maps") but this just returns a string:
> str(stateMapEnv)
chr "R_MAP_DATA_DIR"
I opened the maps directory win-library/3.4/maps/mapdata/ and found what I think is the map file, “state.L”.
I tried reading it with scan and got an error message I do not understand:
scan(file = "D:/Documents/R/win-library/3.4/maps/mapdata/state.L")
Error in scan(file = "D:/Documents/R/win-library/3.4/maps/mapdata/state.L") :
scan() expected 'a real', got '#'
I then opened the file with Notepad++. It appears to be a binary or compressed file.
So I thought it might be an R data file with an unusual extension. But my attempt to load it returned a “bad magic number” error:
st_m <- load("D:/Documents/R/win-library/3.4/maps/mapdata/state.L")
Error in load("D:/Documents/R/win-library/3.4/maps/mapdata/state.L") :
bad restore file magic number (file may be corrupted) -- no data loaded
Observing that these responses have progressed from the unhelpful through the incomprehensible to the occult, I thought it best to seek assistance from the wizards of stackoverflow.
This should be able to export the 'state' or any other maps dataset for you:
library(ggplot2)
state_dataset <- map_data("state")

R - Error in fromJSON(raw.data) : incomplete list

I'm trying to read API data from the BLS into R. I am using the Version 1.0 that does not require registration and is open for public use.
Here is my code:
url <-"http://api.bls.gov/publicAPI/v1/timeseries/data/LAUCN040010000000005"
raw.data <- readLines(url, warn = F)
library(rjson)
rd <- fromJSON(raw.data)
And here is the error message I receive:
Error in fromJSON(raw.data) : incomplete list
If I just try to go to the url in my webrowser it seems to work (pull up a JSON webpage). Not really sure what is going on when I try to get this into R.
When you've used readLines, the object returned is a vector of length 4:
length(raw.data)
You can look at the individual pieces via:
raw.data[1]
If you stick the pieces back together using paste
fromJSON(paste(raw.data, collapse = ""))
everything works. Alternatively,
jsonlite::fromJSON(url)

Using R package BerkeleyEarth

I'm working for the first time with the R package BerkeleyEarth, and attempting to use its convenience functions to access the BEST data. I think maybe it's just a problem with their servers (a matter I've separately addressed to the package's maintainer) but I wanted to know if it's instead something silly I'm doing.
To reproduce my fault
library(BerkeleyEarth)
downloadBerkeley()
which provides the following error message
trying URL 'http://download.berkeleyearth.org/downloads/TAVG/LATEST%20-%20Non-seasonal%20_%20Quality%20Controlled.zip'
Error in download.file(urls$Url[thisUrl], destfile = file.path(destDir, :
cannot open URL 'http://download.berkeleyearth.org/downloads/TAVG/LATEST%20-%20Non-seasonal%20_%20Quality%20Controlled.zip'
In addition: Warning message:
In download.file(urls$Url[thisUrl], destfile = file.path(destDir, :
InternetOpenUrl failed: 'A connection with the server could not be established'
Has anyone had a better experience using this package?
The error message is pointing to a different URL than one should get judging what URLs are listed at http://berkeleyearth.org/data/ that point to the zip formatted files. There are another set of .nc files that appear to be more recent. I would replace the entries in the BerkeleyUrls dataframe with the ones that match your analysis strategy:
This is the current URL that should be in position 1,1:
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/downloads/TAVG/LATEST%20-%20Non-seasonal%20_%20Quality%20Controlled.zip
And this is the one that is in the package dataframe:
> BerkeleyUrls[1,1]
[1] "http://download.berkeleyearth.org/downloads/TAVG/LATEST%20-%20Non-seasonal%20_%20Quality%20Controlled.zip"
I suppose you could try:
BerkeleyUrls[, 1] <- sub( "download\\.berkeleyearth\\.org", "berkeleyearth.lbl.gov", BerkeleyUrls[, 1])

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