trouble unzipping file under Windows

Question

I have the following code:

download.file(
"http://www.wikipathways.org//wpi/batchDownload.php?species=Homo%20sapiens&fileType=txt",
  destfile="human.zip")
files <- unzip( "human.zip", list=T)

It works on Linux, but throws the following error on Windows:

Error in unzip("human.zip", list = T) : 
  error -103 with zipfile in unzGetCurrentFileInfo

Do you happen to know what's the problem?

Answer 1

In ?download.file, we read that:

If mode is not supplied and url ends in one of .gz, .bz2, .xz, .tgz, .zip, .rda or .RData a binary transfer is done. Since Windows (unlike Unix-alikes) does distinguish between text and binary files, care is needed that other binary file types are transferred with mode = "wb".

Note that this list does not include .zip, although it is a binary file type. So you need to pass mode="wb".

I cannot reproduce your example, but it solved my identical problem. Here is an example:

url <- "https://www.bls.gov/cex/pumd/ce_pumd_interview_diary_dictionary.xlsx"

download.file(url, 'file1.xlsx')              

download.file(url, 'file2.xlsx', mode="wb")   # Try this instead

library(readxl)

read_xlsx('file1.xlsx', sheet='Variables')    # Fails
# Error in sheets_fun(path) : 
#   Evaluation error: error -103 with zipfile in unzGetCurrentFileInfo

read_xlsx('file2.xlsx', sheet='Variables')    # Works
# A tibble: 3,580 x 13