title: R using getURL data to dataframe
body: <p>I'm downloading data from the web but then don't know how to change it to a dataframe or anything useful. Does anyone have any suggestions? Here is the code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>library(RCurl) 
  myfile = getURL(http://www.stat.ufl.edu/~winner/data/lister_ul.dat,
  ssl.verifyhost=FALSE, ssl.verifypeer=FALSE)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I use this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>A = read.csv(textConnection(myfile), header = F)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>then R understands this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>c("1 1 1")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>as the first row and not this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>c(1, 1, 1).
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This doesn't work b/c I need to use </p>
  
  <pre><code>colnames(A) = c("col1", "col2", "col3")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and can't find a workaround that doesn't involve some tedious work using </p>
  
  <pre><code>unlist(strsplit(A))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Ughh!!</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions would be appreciated. Or maybe I'll write my own tedious function, if necessary. </p>
  
  <p>gwynn</p>