Read a CSV from github into R

Try this:

library(RCurl)
x <- getURL("https://raw.github.com/aronlindberg/latent_growth_classes/master/LGC_data.csv")
y <- read.csv(text = x)

You have two problems:

1. You're not linking to the "raw" text file, but Github's display version (visit the URL for https:\raw.github.com....csv to see the difference between the raw version and the display version).
2. https is a problem for R in many cases, so you need to use a package like RCurl to get around it. In some cases (not with Github, though) you can simply replace https with http and things work out, so you can always try that out first, but I find using RCurl reliable and not too much extra typing.

From the documentation of url:

Note that ‘https://’ connections are not supported (with some exceptions on Windows).

So the problem is that R does not allow conncetions to https URL's.

You can use download.file with curl:

download.file("https://raw.github.com/aronlindberg/latent_growth_classes/master/LGC_data.csv", 
    destfile = "/tmp/test.csv", method = "curl")

I am using R 3.0.2 and this code does the job.

urlfile<-'https://raw.github.com/aronlindberg/latent_growth_classes/master/LGC_data.csv'
dsin<-read.csv(urlfile)

and this as well

urlfile<-'https://raw.github.com/aronlindberg/latent_growth_classes/master/LGC_data.csv'
dsin<-read.csv(url(urlfile))

edit (sessionInfo)

R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=Polish_Poland.1250  LC_CTYPE=Polish_Poland.1250   
[3] LC_MONETARY=Polish_Poland.1250 LC_NUMERIC=C                  
[5] LC_TIME=Polish_Poland.1250    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.0.2

Realizing that the question is very old, Google still reported it as a top result (at least for me) so I decided to provide the answer for year 2015.

Folks are generally migrating now to curl package (including famous httr) as described by r-bloggers which offers the following very simple solution:

library(curl)

x <- read.csv( curl("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trinker/dummy/master/data/gcircles.csv") )