getHdata {Hmisc} | R Documentation |
This function downloads and makes ready to use datasets from the main
web site for the Hmisc and Design libraries. For R, the datasets were
stored in compressed save
format and getHdata
makes them
available by running load()
after download. For S-Plus, the
datasets were stored in data.dump
format and are made available
by running data.restore()
after import. The dataset is run through the
cleanup.import
function to reduce multiple inheritance problems
for SV4 (S-Plus 5 or later). Calling getHdata
with no
file
argument provides a character vector of names of available
datasets that are currently on the web site. For R, R's default browser
can optionally be launched to view html
files that were already
prepared using the Hmisc command html(contents( ))
or to view
.txt
or .html
data description files when available.
getHdata(file, what = c("data", "contents", "description", "all"), where="http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/pub/Main/DataSets")
file |
an unquoted name of a dataset on the web site,
e.g. prostate . Omit file to obtain a list of
available datasets. |
what |
specify what="contents" to browse the contents
(metadata) for the dataset rather than fetching the data
themselves. Specify what="description" to browse a data
description file if available. Specify what="all" to
retrieve the data and see the metadata and description. |
where |
URL containing the data and metadata files |
For S-Plus, Hmisc defines a function download.file
that is used
by getHdata
. This is a stripped-down version of the R
download.file
function that uses the system wget
executable for fetching files from the Internet. For Unix and Linux
systems, wget
will be pre-installed usually. For windows
S-Plus systems, get wget
from
ftp://sunsite.dk/projects/wget/windows. Once you unzip the file
from there, move wget.exe
to the same Windows directory that
contains ftp.exe
.
getHdata()
without a file
argument returns a character
vector of dataset base names. When a dataset is downloaded, the data
frame is placed in search position one and is not returned as value of
getHdata
.
Frank Harrell
download.file
, cleanup.import
,
data.restore
, load
## Not run: getHdata() # download list of available datasets getHdata(prostate) # downloads, load( ) or data.restore( ) # runs cleanup.import for S-Plus 6 getHdata(valung, "contents") # open browser (options(browser="whatever")) # after downloading valung.html # (result of html(contents())) getHdata(support, "all") # download and open one browser window datadensity(support) attach(support) # make individual variables available getHdata(plasma, "all") # download and open two browser windows # (description file is available for plasma) ## End(Not run)