drive_read_string: Read the content of a Drive file

In googledrive: An Interface to Google Drive

Read the content of a Drive file

Description

These functions return the content of a Drive file as either a string or raw bytes. You will likely need to do additional work to parse the content into a useful R object.

drive_download() is the more generally useful function, but for certain file types, such as comma-separated values (MIME type text/csv), it can be handy to read data directly from Google Drive and avoid writing to disk.

Just as for drive_download(), native Google file types, such as Google Sheets or Docs, must be exported as a conventional MIME type. See the help for drive_download() for more.

Usage

drive_read_string(file, type = NULL, encoding = NULL)

drive_read_raw(file, type = NULL)

Arguments

file	Something that identifies the file of interest on your Google Drive. Can be a name or path, a file id or URL marked with as_id(), or a dribble.
type	Character. Only consulted if file is a native Google file. Specifies the desired type of the exported file. Will be processed via drive_mime_type(), so either a file extension like "pdf" or a full MIME type like "application/pdf" is acceptable.
encoding	Passed along to httr::content(). Describes the encoding of the input file.

Value

• read_drive_string(): a UTF-8 encoded string

• read_drive_raw(): a raw() vector

Examples

# comma-separated values --> data.frame or tibble
(chicken_csv <- drive_example_remote("chicken.csv"))
read.csv(text = chicken_csv |> drive_read_string())

# Google Doc --> character vector
(chicken_doc <- drive_example_remote("chicken_doc"))
chicken_doc |>
  # NOTE: we must specify an export MIME type
  drive_read_string(type = "text/plain") |>
  strsplit(split = "(\r\n|\r|\n)")
  (\(x) x[[1]])()

googledrive documentation built on Sept. 10, 2025, 10:34 a.m.