Proxy setting for R

I am facing problem while conecting R with internet in my office. May be this due to LAN settings. I tried the almost all possible ways I come across in the web (see below) but still in vain.

  • Method1: Invoking R using --internet2

  • Method2: Invoking R by setting ~/Rgui.exe http_proxy=http:/999.99.99.99:8080/ http_proxy_user=ask

  • Method3: Setting Setinternet2=TRUE

  • Method4:

    curl <- getCurlHandle()
    curlSetOpt(.opts = list(proxy = '999.99.99.99:8080'), curl = curl)
    Res <- getURL('http://www.cricinfo.com', curl = curl)
    

In above all methods I can able to load packages directly from CRAN also able to download files using download.file command

But using getURL(RCurl), readHTMLTable(XML), htmlTreeParse(XML) commands I am unable to extract web data. I am getting ~<HEAD>\n<TITLE>Access Denied</TITLE>\n</HEAD>~ error.

How to set LAN proxy settings for XML package in R?


On Mac OS, I found the best solution here. Quoting the author, two simple steps are:

1) Open Terminal and do the following:

export http_proxy=http://staff-proxy.ul.ie:8080
export HTTP_PROXY=http://staff-proxy.ul.ie:8080

2) Run R and do the following:

Sys.setenv(http_proxy="http://staff-proxy.ul.ie:8080")

double-check this with:

Sys.getenv("http_proxy")

I am behind university proxy, and this solution worked perfectly. The major issue is to export the items in Terminal before running R, both in upper- and lower-case.


The problem is with your curl options – the RCurl package doesn't seem to use internet2.dll. You need to specify the port separately, and will probably need to give your user login details as network credentials, e.g.,

opts <- list(
  proxy         = "999.999.999.999", 
  proxyusername = "mydomain\\myusername", 
  proxypassword = "mypassword", 
  proxyport     = 8080
)
getURL("http://stackoverflow.com", .opts = opts)

Remember to escape any backslashes in your password. You may also need to wrap the URL in a call to curlEscape.