RCurl, error: couldn't connect to host

Question

I use Rstudio server, and the packages RCurl and XML. I tried to scrape a webpage, but after having done it once successfully, I got the error message:

 Error in curlPerform(curl = curl, .opts = opts, .encoding = .encoding) : 
 couldn't connect to host

when trying to get the URL:

getURL(my_url, encoding="UTF-8", followLocation = TRUE)

Any ideas why this is happening?

Answer 1

Maybe you should try setting your RCurlOptions:

options(RCurlOptions = list(proxy = "my.proxy", proxyport = my.proxyport.number))

I hope it helps.