A tiny RCurl headache ;)

As more and more data go online (plus we love Google Drive) we are forced to connect to our data over the net. We mostly do this via RCurl (but we could do this using RGoogleDocs as well).In that case all that is required to get the data into R is the two lines of code

require(RCurl)
myCsv<-getURL("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AiD-
XfJ7BS9udG90TG9RZUQ2ZFZXMTRRNVZYU0Uxb1E&output=csv")

However, it's possible you end up with a message like this...All in all the point is that the data load *failed*.

Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE)  : 
  SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed

In that case the solution is to add the ssl.verifypeer = FALSE to the getURL function to override the default behavior of R.

myCsv<-getURL("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AiD-
XfJ7BS9udG90TG9RZUQ2ZFZXMTRRNVZYU0Uxb1E&output=csv", ssl.verifypeer = FALSE)

Note: The above holds for RGoogleDocs too, given that the package depends on RCurl for the heavy lifting.

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