Working with online data and services

With growing amounts of data available from web-based sources, it is increasingly important for machine learning projects to be able to access and interact with online services. R is able to read data from online sources natively, with some caveats. First, by default, R cannot access secure websites (those using https:// rather than the http:// protocol). Secondly, it is important to note that most web pages do not provide data in a form that R can understand. The data will need to be parsed, or broken apart and rebuilt into a structured form before it can be useful. We'll discuss the workarounds shortly.

However, if neither of these caveats apply, that is, if the data are already online in a non-secure website ...

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