Error on Rcpi package

[htorkey]

Hi

I got this error when I tied to rerun your tutorial on Rcpi

drugseq <- getSmiFromKEGG(drugid, parallel = 5)
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.guha.rcdk.util.Misc.loadMolecules(Misc.java:169)
Error in load.molecules(tmpfile) :
org.openscience.cdk.exception.CDKException: java.lang.NullPointerException

[nanxstats]

@htorkey -thanks for reporting this. It seems that the KEGG API behind this now just randomly return a 403 access forbidden error instead of the correct content (in this case, the mol file). It is possible that they introduced some new rate limits to avoid people from scraping the data. Cannot say if this is going to be a transient issue or not, but let's wait and see.

The ad-hoc solution is simple -- you could get the smiles or mol from other public sources, such as DrugBank, PubChem, and ChEMBL, which are also supported by the package.