Downloading Excel File Using R

Question

I am trying to download an Excel file from Central bank of Colombia website, but it seems that the usual download.file function couldn't do the job.

For example, I am trying to download the first file "Serie historica" on this page: http://www.banrep.gov.co/es/indice-tasa-cambio-real

The link to the file is as follows, which I used in the download.file function http://obieebr.banrep.gov.co/analytics/saw.dll?Download&Format=excel2007&Extension=.xls&BypassCache=true&path=%2Fshared%2FSeries%20Estad%c3%adsticas_T%2F1.%20Indice%20de%20Tasa%20de%20Cambio%20Real%2F1.1.%20Serie%20historica_IQY&SyncOperation=1&NQUser=publico&NQPassword=publico

The command I used is:

download.file(filepath, destfile, quiet=FALSE, mode="wb")

Answer 1

I hope this example will guide you

library(readxl)
library(httr)
url1<-'https://evs.nci.nih.gov/ftp1/CDISC/SDTM/SDTM%20Terminology.xls'
GET(url1, write_disk(tf <- tempfile(fileext = ".xls")))
df <- read_excel(tf, 2L)
str(df)

If you can download the file you could read it as follows

library(readxl)
datos <- read_xlsx("C:/Users/USER/Downloads/1.1. Serie historica_IQY.xlsx", skip = 8, n_max = 369)

Answer 2

If you are on the windows please consider using mode = "wb" :

download.file("http://gapm.io/dl_pop",
              destfile = "data/pop1800_2100.xlsx",
              mode = "wb")

Answer 3

The answer is a bit late but I think it is still worthwhile to provide a solution.

It is not possible to use the download.file function since this link does not really direct directly to the file. Actually it is a query to an API using the GET method, so you should use another code structure to get the file, a situation that can occur repeatedly for those who use webscraping techniques

I share an example of how the excel file is obtained for the daily COLCAP index:

url <- 'http://obieebr.banrep.gov.co/analytics/saw.dll?Download&Format=excel2007&Extension=.xlsx&BypassCache=true&Path=%2fshared%2fSeries%20Estad%c3%adsticas_T%2f1.%20%c3%8dndices%20de%20mercado%20burs%c3%a1til%20colombiano%2f1.1.%20IGBC,%20IBB%20e%20IBOMED%2f1.1.1.IMBC_COLCAP%20IQY&lang=es&NQUser=publico&NQPassword=publico&SyncOperation=1'

content_type = "text/html; charset=utf-8"
while (content_type == "text/html; charset=utf-8") {
  request <- GET(url,
                 add_headers(`Accept` = 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3',
                             `Accept-Encoding` = 'gzip, deflate',
                             `Accept-Language` = 'es-ES,es;q=0.9',
                             `Connection` = 'keep-alive',
                             `Host` = 'obieebr.banrep.gov.co',
                             `User-Agent` = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/77.0.3865.90 Safari/537.36'),
                 write_disk("COLCAP_daily.xlsx", overwrite = T),
                 verbose()
  )
  content_type = request$all_headers[[1]]$headers$`content-type`
}

I hope the example is helpful, if you still have doubts we could review it in more detail. Regards.