gunzip a file stream in R?

Question

I'm trying to create an R API for StackOverflow. The output is gzipped. For example:

readLines("http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/stats/", warn=F)
[1] "\037‹\b"                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
[2] "\030\002úØÛy°óé½\036„iµXäË–[<üt—Zu[\\VmÎHî=ÜÛݹ×ýz’Í.äûû÷>ý´\a\177Ýh÷\017îÝÛÙwßÚáÿþ«¼þý\027ÅrÝæÔlgüÀëA±\017›ìŽï{M¤û.\020\037�Ë\"¿’\006³ì\032„Úß9¸ÿ`¼ç÷³*~ÿKêˆð¡\006v¦ð²ýô£�ñÃ�ì+ôU�_\026滽�]êt¼·?ÞûÈ4ù%\016~S0^>àe¶ÀG\037½n³éÛôKê缬®‚\016Êê¢úý×u‰fó¶]=º{·aΚŽ—y{·©î\026‹‹»h5^-/‚W1 |9[UŲõ^§�Ç"
[3] ":¬´¿1M\177ð\"0íö¹ñ…YÞLëbÕ*!~â\027\036§çU�®êê¢ÎˆµhòýæÅ´Zn\036S¶Z•ùv[­§óm´î�"                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
[4] "Í™t˪^d¥£·üÂ?¾ÿ\033'¿$ù\177"  

Is there a good way to gunzip this in R, short of writing the output to file, gunzip'ing it, and reading it back in?

Answer 1

You could do:

conn <- gzcon(url("http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/stats/"))
data <- readLines(conn)

Answer 2

Try:

p <- gzcon(url("http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/stats/"))
readLines(p)