Is there a good R API for accessing Google Docs?

Question

I'm using R for data analysis, and I'm sharing some data with collaborators via Google docs. Is there a simple interface that I can use to access a R data.frame object to and from a Google Docs spreadsheet? If not, is there a similar API in other languages?

score 18 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 28 '17 at 15:21

18

There are two packages:

RGoogleDocs on Omegahat: the package allows you to get a list of the documents and details about each of them, download the contents of a document, remove a document, and upload a document, even binary files.
RGoogleData on RForge: provides R access to Google services through the Google supported Java API. Currently the R interface only supports Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

edited Mar 28 '17 at 15:21

tonytonov

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answered Apr 19 '10 at 07:05

rcs

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I would love more information on this. It appears that RGoogleData currently fails to build? The following from RGoogleDocs `login<-readline() password<-readline() google.con<-getGoogleDocsConnection(login, password) getDocs(google.con)` throws me the `Error in getDocs(google.con) : problems connecting to get the list of documents: Forbidden (403)` – Etienne Low-Décarie Jul 11 '12 at 19:07
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adding "wise" to the `getGoogleDocsConnection` has resolved my issue. – Etienne Low-Décarie Jul 11 '12 at 19:13

Sam Firke · Answer 2 · 2015-10-16T16:55:07.073

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As of 2015, there is now the googlesheets package. It is the best option out there for analyzing and editing Google Sheets data in R. Not only can it pull data from Google Sheets, but you can edit the data in Google Sheets, create new sheets, etc.

The GitHub link above has a readme with usage details; there's also a vignette for getting started, or you can find the official documentation on CRAN.

edited Oct 16 '15 at 16:55

answered Mar 25 '15 at 13:07

Sam Firke

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score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 11 '11 at 23:27

This may partially answer the question, or help others who want to begin by only downloading FROM public google spreadsheets: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2009/09/how-to-use-a-google-spreadsheet-as-data-in-r.html#

I had a problem with certificates, and instead of figuring that out, I use the option ssl.verifypeer=FALSE. E.g.:

getURL("https://<googledocs URL for sharing CSV>, ssl.verifypeer=FALSE)

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 16 '13 at 06:45

I put up a Github project to demonstrate how to use RGoogleDocs to read from a Google Spreadsheet. I have not yet been able to write to cells, but the read path works great.

Check out the README at https://github.com/hammer/google-spreadsheets-to-r-dataframe

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 11 '15 at 12:04

I just wrote another package to download Google Docs spreadsheets. Its much simpler than the alternatives, since it just requires the URL (and that 'share by link' is enabled).

Try it:

install.packages('gsheet')
library(gsheet)
gsheet2tbl('docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I9mJsS5QnXF2TNNntTy-HrcdHmIF9wJ8ONYvEJTXSNo')

More detail is here: https://github.com/maxconway/gsheet

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 19 '10 at 07:12

Since R itself is relatively limited when it comes to execution flow control, i suggest using an api to an high-level programming language provided by google: link text. There you can pick whichever you are most familiar with.

I for one always use python templates to give R a little more flexibility, so that would be a good combination.

For the task of exporting data from R to google docs, the first thing that comes to my mind would be to save it to csv, then parse and talk to g/docs with one of the given languages.

Is there a good R API for accessing Google Docs?

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