Import data from GitHub
<p>I'm trying to import this data set from GitHub:</p>

<p><a href="https://github.com/shifteight/R/blob/master/TRB/data/worldfloras.txt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/shifteight/R/blob/master/TRB/data/worldfloras.txt</a></p>

<p>I tried it the following way:</p>

<pre><code>library(XML)
library(RCurl)

url&lt;-"https://github.com/shifteight/R/blob/master/TRB/data/worldfloras.txt"
urldata&lt;-getURL(url)
data&lt;-readHTMLTable(url data, header=TRUE, sep="\t" stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
</code></pre>

<p>Though I use sep=”\t", my output is the following.</p>

<pre><code>    $`NULL`
 Country\tLatitude\tArea\tPopulation\tFlora\tEndemism\tContinent
    1                       Afghanistan\t30\t636\t14.3\t3000\t0.27\tAsia
    2                            Albania\t42\t29\t3\t3200\t0.008\tEurope
    3                      Algeria\t35\t2382\t21.3\t3139\t0.08\tN.Africa
</code></pre>

<p>...</p>

<p>Does anyone have an explanation for that? I'd be very happy if someone finds a solution to my problem.</p>