Is there a good R API for accessing Google Docs?

Question

I'm using R for data analysis, and I'm sharing some data with collaborators via Google docs. Is there a simple interface that I can use to access a R data.frame object to and from a Google Docs spreadsheet? If not, is there a similar API in other languages?

Answer 1

There are two packages:

• RGoogleDocs on Omegahat: the package allows you to get a list of the documents and details about each of them, download the contents of a document, remove a document, and upload a document, even binary files.
• RGoogleData on RForge: provides R access to Google services through the Google supported Java API. Currently the R interface only supports Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Answer 2

As of 2015, there is now the googlesheets package. It is the best option out there for analyzing and editing Google Sheets data in R. Not only can it pull data from Google Sheets, but you can edit the data in Google Sheets, create new sheets, etc.

The GitHub link above has a readme with usage details; there's also a vignette for getting started, or you can find the official documentation on CRAN.

Answer 3

This may partially answer the question, or help others who want to begin by only downloading FROM public google spreadsheets: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2009/09/how-to-use-a-google-spreadsheet-as-data-in-r.html#

I had a problem with certificates, and instead of figuring that out, I use the option ssl.verifypeer=FALSE. E.g.:

getURL("https://<googledocs URL for sharing CSV>, ssl.verifypeer=FALSE)