source_gist "Error: client error: (404) not found error"

[sfuj]

I'm not sure if it is just my system, but source_gist doesn't seem to work anymore.. I've tried my own gists and the ones in ?source_gist

My first bug report, so apologies if this isn't the way to do it.

I get the same error on both devtools version 1.2 and 1.3.99 (both on R 2.15.2)

source_gist('https://gist.github.com/sfuj/6605249')
[1] "https://raw.github.com/gist/6605249"
Error: client error: (404) Not Found

[jeffwong]

I saw this too. the source_gist command uses source_url underneath, which uses Rcurl to retrieve the file; if you enter https://raw.github.com/gist/1654919 into your web browser you'll find that it truly doesn't exist. I think github must have changed the way it structures its urls, and devtools just hasn't caught up

Here is a link on SO describing how gist urls have changed
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12522539/github-gist-editing-without-changing-url

[hadley]

@sfuj It'd be useful if you could post the correct url

[jeffwong]

Here's a quick fix that should do the trick - note that username has to be passed in now. It would be cool if there was some kind of regex to extract the username from a url if the user specified something like

https://gist.github.com/jeffwong/6517317

source_gist <- function(entry, username, ..., sha1 = NULL) {
  # 1654919 or "1654919"
  if (is.numeric(entry) ||  grepl("^[0-9a-f]+$", entry)) {
    entry <- sprintf("https://gist.github.com/%s/%s/raw", username, entry)
  }
  # https://gist.github.com/kohske/1654919, https://gist.github.com/1654919,
  # or gist.github.com/1654919
  else if (grepl("((^https://)|^)gist.github.com/([^/]+/)?[0-9a-f]+$", entry)) {
    entry <- sprintf("https://gist.github.com/%s/%s/raw",
                     username,
                     regmatches(entry, regexpr("[0-9a-f]+$", entry)))
  }
  print(entry)
  source_url(entry, ..., sha1 = sha1)
}

[sfuj]

apologies @hadley, although those urls were from ?source_gist, I should've tried them before posting.

Just created a dummy public gist.. if that helps.

[hadley]

To fix this properly, we should probably use the github api to look up the correct url from the id. This would prevent it from breaking in the future if github changes formats again.