I have a R object (class: 'raw') loaded into the environment. It's in a binary format. I know this (zipped) R object contains a single file (e.g. a pdf or txt file).
Let's call this object: 'zipped_r_object'.
I do not have the original file saved on my computer. This object is fetched from a databaseconnection.
That is why I want to unzip the binary/raw 'zipped_r_object' directly from the R-environment and save the unzipped content in a new object ('unzipped_object'). This way, I can process the file further.
How can I do this in R? I know how to unzip from a saved zip-archive saved on my computer. But I can't seem to this exclusively in the R environment.
Many thanks!
One approach is to writeBin the object out to a file.
writeBin(zipped_r_object, "temp.zip")
You could also write it out to a temp file and then use unzip with list = TRUE to see the name of the file contained in the archive.
temp <- tempfile()
writeBin(zipped_r_object, temp)
unzip(temp, list = TRUE)
Then you could extract it to a temp directory:
temp2 <- tempdir()
unzip(temp, temp2)
list.files(temp2)