Swirl: Swirl not successfully starting a course under R programming [R version 3.1.1 on Windows 8; 64bit]

Created on 17 Jul 2014 · 3Comments · Source: swirldev/swirl

I get the following error message when I select one of the 6 modules under the R programming course.

     Error in gzfile(file, mode) : cannot open the connection
      | Leaving swirl now. Type swirl() to resume.

My R console starts in my documents directory. ["C:/Users/MyName/Documents/]. The following steps were successfully carried out, over and over again, to see whether the above error would be solved.

 install.packages("swirl")
 library(swirl)
 install_from_swirl("R Programming")
 swirl()

From there onwards, I select the 1: R programming which brings up the list of the 6 modules. Then whenever I select a module, the following displays:

  Error in gzfile(file, mode) : cannot open the connection
   | Leaving swirl now. Type swirl() to resume.

Source

Sarpwus

👍1

Most helpful comment

Try right-clicking R/RStudio and selecting "Run as administrator", if that's an option. This problem has to do with file permissions where we store the courses and crops up occasionally for Windows users and people on work computers.

ncarchedi on 17 Jul 2014

👍3

All 3 comments

ncarchedi on 17 Jul 2014

👍3

@Sarpwus and I continued this discussion on the Coursera forums. I realized that we didn't check the user's name for punctuation/special characters and this could lead to an invalid file path for their user data. Hence the error above.

Fixed in https://github.com/swirldev/swirl/commit/0ffd3e04011b2acc23180f016f1015a82fe597cf

ncarchedi on 19 Jul 2014

Thank you!!!