7 fread

readDWD has the argument fread to read datasets through data.table::fread.
This is significantly faster than base unzip + read.table, especially for large historical files.
The default is fread=NA, which checks for availability of the R package data.table and the system command unzip.

7.1 windows unzip

On Windows, the system command unzip is not available by default, only through e.g. a git shell or Rtools (source).
If needed, install Rtools (directly at C:/Rtools since compiler paths may not have spaces, as there would be with C:/Program Files/R/Rtools/).

You might then need to add something like C:/rtools40/usr/bin to PATH, e.g. with the R code

cat('PATH="${RTOOLS40_HOME}\\usr\\bin;${PATH}"', file="~/.Renviron", append=TRUE)

and then restart R (CTRL + SHIFT + F10 should suffice).

Check the availability of unzip with

Sys.which("unzip") # gives me c:\\Rtools\\bin\\unzip.exe

Note that github user Mightynasty did not get unzip in Rtools to work correctly.

For more background information, see rdwd issues 22, 23 and 24.

7.2 alternative

In case you do not need fast reading and don’t want the warning about unzip, simply use readDWD("file.zip", fread=FALSE).

7.3 error messages

The following error messages have been reported to me.

[pfile] is the produkt file, e.g. produkt_klima_tag_19370101_19860630_00001.txt for
[path] DWDdata/daily_kl_historical_tageswerte_KL_00001_19370101_19860630_hist.zip

‘unzip’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
'(unzip -p [path].zip [pfile].txt) > [Rtempfile]' execution failed with error code 1
File ‘[Rtempfile]’ has size 0. Returning a NULL data.frame. File contains no rows: [path].zip

Error in data.table::fread(paste(“unzip -p”, f, fp), na.strings = na9(), : File is empty: [Rtempfile]
In addition: Warning messages:
1: running command 'C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe /c (unzip -p [path].zip [pfile].txt) > [Rtempfile] had status 1
2: In shell(paste("(", input, ") > ", tt, sep = "")) : '(unzip -p [path].zip [pfile].txt) > [Rtempfile]' execution failed with error code 1

Der Befehl “unzip” ist entweder falsch geschrieben oder konnte nicht gefunden werden.
The command “unzip” is either misspelled or could not be found.