[SOLVED] How to download an .xlsx file in R and load the data into a dataframe?

How to download an .xlsx file in R and load the data into a dataframe?

I'm trying to download an .xlsx file from the eia and getting the following error.

The error is: "Error: ZipException (Java): invalid entry size (expected 2385 but got 2390 bytes)"

I have tried the following code:

library(XLConnect)
tmp = tempfile(fileext = ".xlsx")
download.file(url = "http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/drilling/xls/dpr-data.xlsx", destfile = tmp)
readWorksheetFromFile(file = tmp, sheet = "Eagle Ford Region", header = FALSE, startRow = 9, endRow = 151)

I have tried the other recommendations at: Read Excel file into R with XLConnect package from URL

Solution

You should use wb - binary mode while downloading the files, that are not plain text:

download.file(url = "http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/drilling/xls/dpr-data.xlsx", destfile = tmp, mode="wb")

This will solve the issue.