How to read files from a UNC-specified directory in R?

Question

Is it possible to read files from a UNC-specified directory in R? I'd like to do it without using any packages beyond the base installation.

Answer 1

UNC names work fine, you just have to escape them correctly. This works for me:

read.csv('\\\\COMPUTER\\Directory\\file.txt')

Answer 2

a slightly more cross-platform approach

# the two '' are required to represent the two leading slashes of the UNC path
read.csv(file.path('', '', 'COMPUTER', 'Directory' 'file.txt'))

Answer 3

adding to nograpes answer ... you can avoid the escaping ugliness by using forward slashes ... this works as well

read.csv('//COMPUTER/Directory/file.txt')