All you need to know is the name of the file you want to download and its Dropbox key. The source_DropboxData command is in the most recent version of repmis (v0.2.4) is the result. With some modifications I was able to easily create a function that could download data from non-Public Dropbox folders. Luckily, today I ran across this blog post by Kay Cichini. I used to think that accessing a plain-text data file embedded in one of these webpages would require some tricky web scrapping. The Dropbox webpage you're taken to is filled with lots of other Dropbox information. When you click on a Dropbox-based file's Share Link button you are taken to a secure URL, but not for the file itself. Getting data from a non-Public folder into R was a trickier. Instead you need can use the source_data command from repmis: FinURL <- paste0('įinRegulatorData <- repmis::source_data(FinURL, These cannot be accessed with read.table. Dropbox recently changed Public links to be secure (https) URLs.

It's easy to download these into R, just use the read.table command, where the URL is the file name. It used to be that files in Public folders were accessible through non-secure (http) URLs. Regardless, sometimes you may want to download data from one. New users need to actively create a Public folder. Dropbox Public Folderĭropbox is trying to do away with its public folders.

The download method is different depending on whether or not your plain-text data is in a Dropbox Public folder or not. So I though that I'ld write a quick post on how to directly download data from Dropbox into R. There has been a change in the way Dropbox URLs work and I just added some functionality to the repmis R package. Though I prefer to host and access plain-text data sets (CSV is my personal favourite) from GitHub (see my short paper on the topic) sometimes it's convenient to get data stored on Dropbox. I'm always looking for ways to download data from the internet into R.

Public dropbox links