Excel Reader - cant download

[ved]

Hello. I am new to R, trying to learn it. And i have come to a hurdle on the first step! I am trying to simply download the excel reader package and i keep getting this message. Any ideas?

Error in read.dcf(file.path(pkgname, "DESCRIPTION"), c("Package", "Type")) :
cannot open the connection
Calls: sourceWithProgress ... -> .install.winbinary -> unpackPkgZip -> read.dcf
In addition: Warning messages:
1: In unzip(zipname, exdir = dest) : error 1 in extracting from zip file
2: In read.dcf(file.path(pkgname, "DESCRIPTION"), c("Package", "Type")) :
cannot open compressed file 'glue/DESCRIPTION', probable reason 'No such file or directory'
Execution halted

[andresrcs]

I'm afraid we don't have enough information to help you out, can you please post the specific command you are using to install the package and the complete console output you get?

[ved]

Command used: install.packages("readxl")
output:

install.packages("readxl")
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages but is not currently installed. Please download and install the appropriate version of Rtools before proceeding:

https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/Rtools/
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/vcedwards/Documents/R/win-library/3.5’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
also installing the dependencies ‘glue’, ‘cli’, ‘utf8’, ‘rematch’, ‘ellipsis’, ‘fansi’, ‘lifecycle’, ‘magrittr’, ‘pillar’, ‘pkgconfig’, ‘rlang’, ‘vctrs’, ‘hms’, ‘prettyunits’, ‘R6’, ‘crayon’, ‘cellranger’, ‘tibble’, ‘cpp11’, ‘progress’

There are binary versions available but the source versions are later:
binary source needs_compilation
glue 1.4.0 1.6.2 TRUE
cli 2.0.2 3.3.0 FALSE
utf8 1.1.4 1.2.2 TRUE
ellipsis 0.3.0 0.3.2 TRUE
fansi 0.4.1 1.0.3 TRUE
lifecycle 0.2.0 1.0.1 FALSE
magrittr 1.5 2.0.3 FALSE
pillar 1.4.3 1.7.0 FALSE
rlang 0.4.5 1.0.4 TRUE
vctrs 0.2.4 0.4.1 TRUE
hms 0.5.3 1.1.1 FALSE
R6 2.4.1 2.5.1 FALSE
crayon 1.3.4 1.5.1 FALSE
tibble 3.0.1 3.1.7 TRUE
readxl 1.3.1 1.4.0 TRUE

Binaries will be installed
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/3.5/glue_1.4.0.zip'
Content type 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' length 3914 bytes
downloaded 3914 bytes

Warning in install.packages :
error 1 in extracting from zip file
Warning in install.packages :
cannot open compressed file 'glue/DESCRIPTION', probable reason 'No such file or directory'
Error in install.packages : cannot open the connection

(note that the 'trying URL...' output section is repeated 12 times, but i am unable to post more than two links on here.
Thank you

[andresrcs]

@ved

note that the 'trying URL...' output section is repeated 12 times, but i am unable to post more than two links on here.

To avoid this limitation when posting console output you have to post it as formatted code, here is how to do it.

FAQ: How to format your code

Formatting Code: the Basics All code or console output you include in your posts should be formatted properly. Luckily, this is very easy to do! Just use the code formatting button at the top of the post editing box: [image] Select some code Click the </> button! The code formatting button automatically adds special Markdown formatting symbols to whatever you selected. If you check the preview pane to the right of your post, you'll see that the forum software now outputs nicely formatted code . [04] The code formatting button is pretty smart! It can tell the difference between snippets of code that are part of a sentence and blocks of code that stand alone. …

@ved

error 1 in extracting from zip file
Warning in install.packages :
cannot open compressed file 'glue/DESCRIPTION', probable reason 'No such file or directory'

It seems downloaded binaries are getting corrupted somehow, maybe an encoding issue. Old R versions can't handle utf-8 on Windows systems. I would try updating to the latest R version 4.2.1.