I have used this method in the past to create temporary folders (which accumulate and I don't like) and download and unzip data from online repositories.
x <- tempfile()
download.file(url = "https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/00275/Bike-Sharing-Dataset.zip", destfile = x)
read.csv(file = unz(description = x, filename = "hour.csv"))
I'd appreciate any suggestions for improvements over this kludgy solution.