Permission Denied Error when downloading a file

Question

I am trying to download an excel zip file into a R Project folder that I have started. I'm new to R so I'm a little puzzled at the error message that I'm receiving.

The file is an excel file and so first I created a variable for the file:

excel2file="http://op.nsf.data/dataFiles/Housing2013EXCEL.zip"

Then I used the coding:

download.file(excel2file, destfile= "~/Home/Documents/Data")

I receive this error message:

Error in download.file(excel2file, destfile = "~/Home/Documents/Data") : 
  cannot open destfile '~/Home/Documents/Data', reason 'Permission denied'

I tried looking at other examples of permission denied and I think it may be my destination file but I am not sure why or the steps to trouble shoot it.

Answer 1

destfile should be a filename, not a directory. For example:

download.file(excel2file, destfile= "~/Home/Documents/Data/Housing2013EXCEL.zip")

Also, that URL doesn't seem to be valid, but that's a different (non-R) problem.