从 R 中的 github 加载原始文件

Question

I am trying to load a codebook from github in R studio. The url is here . It is a md file based on the link, but I want to load its raw file. (As pic1 shows on the top right this is a tab called raw , and when I click that, it shows pic2 ).I try to use the link provided, but it does not work. Could anyone help to tell how to do that? Thanks a lot!

cddf<-url("https://github.com/HimesGroup/BMIN503/blob/master/DataFiles/NHANES_2007to2008_DataDictionary.md")
cd<-read.table(cddf )

Update: When I changed the code:

codebook<-read.table("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HimesGroup/BMIN503/master/DataFiles/NHANES_2007to2008_DataDictionary.md",skip = 4, sep = "|", head = TRUE)

The r successfully read most of them, but the sep "|" did not work for two variables: INDHHIN2 and MCQ010. See pic. Can anyone help to figure out why? Thanks~~!

Answer 1

There are two issues here.

First, the raw file is available at the link https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HimesGroup/BMIN503/master/DataFiles/NHANES_2007to2008_DataDictionary.md . However, read.table is not going to be able to read that file without some help: read.table is used for tab or comma delimited files, and that's a table marked up for Markdown. This comes close:

read.table("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HimesGroup/BMIN503/master/DataFiles/NHANES_2007to2008_DataDictionary.md",
 skip = 4, sep = "|", head = TRUE)

but it will still need some cleanup, to remove the first and last columns of junk it added, and to delete the first line.