Attempt to download a URL resource, failing gracefully.

Source: R/safedata_network.R

This function tries to fetch the HEAD for the resource and handles failure to resolve (such as a bad safedata API url), timeouts and then actual HTTP error codes. If none of those occur, the resource is downloaded.

try_to_download(url, local_path = NULL, timeout = 10)

Arguments

url

The URL to download.

local_path

A path to a file in which to save the URL content.

timeout

The waiting time in seconds before a request should timeout.

Value

An response object or a boolean showing if the download attempt was successful.

Details

If the download fails, the function returns FALSE and the return value attribute 'fail_msg' is used to provide details. Otherwise, an response object is returned containing the resource. If a local path is provided, the resource is downloaded to that path and the function returns TRUE to indicate success.

Note

This function contains code to simulate network failures of varying kinds (no network, no API, specific resource unavailable) for use in unit testing that the safedata package handles theses errors gracefully.