Can I load a package's data set without installing the package?

Question

In package ISLR, there is a data set called Default.

I want to use that data set, but the ISLR package is not installed on my machine.

data(Default)
# Warning message:
# In data(Default) : data set ‘Default’ not found
library(ISLR)
# Error in library(ISLR) : there is no package called ‘ISLR’

Since I'll probably never use it again, I don't want to install the package. I thought about reading it from the web, but it's not in the linked web page from the package description.

In general, is there a way to load a data set from a package without installing the package?

Answer 1

You can do this from within R:

download.file("http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/ISLR_1.0.tar.gz",
                dest="ISLR.tar.gz")
untar("ISLR.tar.gz",files="ISLR/data/Default.rda")
L <- load("ISLR/data/Default.rda")
summary(Default)

If you want to keep a copy of the data file:

file.copy("ISLR/data/Default.rda",".")

Clean up:

unlink(c("ISLR.tar.gz","ISLR"),recursive=TRUE)

I'm not sure you can get around having to download the tarball -- in principle you might be able to run untar() directly on a network connection, but I don't think the underlying machinery can actually extract a file without downloading the whole tarball to somewhere on your machine first.