Richard Meitern

> Is the link [www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/10m/cultural/ne_10m_admin_0_countries.zip](http://www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/10m/cultural/ne_10m_admin_0_countries.zip) works in your browser? Actually it does, so it can't be a firewall or some other problem, I guess. So I have no idea ?...

> Try this to check connection from R: > library(curl) > curl::has_internet() TRUE write.csv(data.frame(), tempfile()) gives no error Furthermore other urls work i.e: `utils::download.file(file.path('https://file-examples.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/zip_2MB.zip'), zip_file

UPDATE: It works if I specify download method to in download to libcurl i.e: `utils::download.file(file.path(address), zip_file

> Sure you haven't set the `download.file.method` to something else? So the error appears both in Rstudio console and R console. The `options("download.file.method")` returns: `NULL` in R console "wininet"`` in...

if you want to use the latest version of orthoDB you can consider also using a fork where I implemented it https://github.com/rix133/dammit/tree/OrthoDBv10

I understand that introducing this complexity might be something the maintainer does not want to incorporate. So anybody really needing this can use my fork to introduce some of this...

It's totally up to you. :) I just prefer to use writexl as it is fast and works well. I just wanted those convenience options to the result. I can't...

> > In what way would we benefit from duplicating this functionality in writexl? > > If we had done it first in `writexl` we wouldn't be duplicating. A lot...

>(but apparently no HTTP errors were detected?). Yes, no HTTP errors of any sort

ok anyhow seems that the whole ITIS service is down right now and it does not handle this well