read_excel: issue accessing .xlsx on web

tidyverse
1

I'm looking for help with readxl. I need to access an .xlsx file from the web. I want to use readxl as it will allow me to specify col_type. The file is a data collection template containing no rows. I'm using it to facilitate column ordering of data collected in the field. I can access the data using openxlsx::read.xlsx, however all the columns are classified as logical which complicates dplyr::bind_rows in my script

so, this imports the file but with incorrect column classes
read.xlsx("https://....xlsx", sheet = 4)

and this gives an error
readxl::read_xlsx("https://....xlsx", sheet = 4)
Error: path does not exist:

It seems like read_xlsx should work. I can always import with openxlsx and use purrr::map to reclassify cols, just looking for the simplest solution. Any assistance would be appreciated.

2

I believe readxl doesn't yet support reading from a URL take a look into this github issue for more information about this.

3

Thanks for the link to github. Sure enough readxl does not yet support fetching data from web sources. The link contained useful information on using httr::GET to import the data into a tempfile and accessing it with read_xlsx from there.

template <- tempfile(fileext = ".xlsx")
GET(url = "https://...xlsx",
write_disk(template) )