R help - Jun 2014 - test if a url exists

Hi all,

I need to test if a url exists. I used url.exists() in RCurl package

library(RCurl)

however the test result is kind of weird. For example,
> url.exists("http://www.amazon.com")
[1] FALSE

although www.amazon.com<http://www.amazon.com> is a valid url. Does
anybody know how to use that function correctly or the other way to test url
existence?

Thanks.

HXD

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On 29/06/2014, 7:12 AM, Hui Du wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I need to test if a url exists. I used url.exists() in RCurl package
> 
> library(RCurl)
> 
> however the test result is kind of weird. For example,
> 
>> url.exists("http://www.amazon.com")
> [1] FALSE
> 
> although www.amazon.com<http://www.amazon.com> is a valid url. Does
anybody know how to use that function correctly or the other way to test url
existence?
You can use the .header = TRUE option to that call to see the error 405
that it gives.

Duncan Murdoch