How to download file from internet via R

Question

I have an url, and I want to download the file via R, I notice that download.file would be helpful, but my problem seems different:

url <- "http://journal.gucas.ac.cn/CN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=11771"
destfile <- "myfile.pdf"
download.file(url, destfile)

It doesn't work! I notice that if my url is in the form of xxx.pdf, then the code above is no problem, otherwise the file that is downloaded is corrupt.

Does anyone know how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Setting the mode might be required to treat the file as binary data while saving it. If I leave that argument out, I get a blank file, but this way works for me:

url <- "http://journal.gucas.ac.cn/CN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?
attachType=PDF&id=11771"
destfile <- "myfile.pdf"
download.file(url, destfile, mode="wb")