downloadWithRetries: Download and Cache a Dataset
In argoFloats: Analysis of Oceanographic Argo Floats

downloadWithRetries

R Documentation

Download and Cache a Dataset

Description

General function for downloading and caching a dataset.

Usage

downloadWithRetries(
  url,
  destdir,
  destfile,
  quiet = FALSE,
  age = argoDefaultProfileAge(),
  retries = 3,
  async = FALSE,
  debug = 0
)

Arguments

`url`	character value giving the full URL of a file to be downloaded.
`destdir`	character value indicating the directory in which to store downloaded files. The default value is to compute this using `argoDefaultDestdir()`, which returns `⁠~/data/argo⁠` by default, although it also provides ways to set other values using `options()`. Set `destdir=NULL` if `destfile` is a filename with full path information. File clutter is reduced by creating a top-level directory called `data`, with subdirectories for various file types; see “Examples”.
`destfile`	either character value indicating the name of the file or `NULL` (the default), in which case the file name is constructed from the other parameters of the function call, so that subsequent calls with the same parameters will yield the same result; this is useful for caching.
`quiet`	logical value; use `FALSE` to show more verbose information when downloading files. (Even if `quiet` is TRUE, problems will still be reported.)
`age`	a numerical value indicating a time interval, in days. If the file to be downloaded from the server already exists locally, and was created is less than `age` days in the past, it will not be downloaded. The default, `argoDefaultProfileAge()`, is one year. Setting `age=0` will force a download.
`retries`	integer telling how many times to retry a download, if the first attempt fails.
`async`	Use `TRUE` to perform requests asynchronously. This is much faster for many small files (e.g., Argo profile NetCDF files).
`debug`	integer value indicating level of debugging. If this is less than 1, no debugging is done. Otherwise, some functions will print debugging information. If a function call fails, the first step should be to rerun the function with `debug=1`, to see if the output suggests a problem in the call.