Download all Documents from Google Drive with R

A commentator on my blog recently asked if it is possible to retrieve all direct links to your Google Documents. And indeed it can be very easily done with R, just like so:

# you'll need RGoogleDocs (with RCurl dependency..)
install.packages("RGoogleDocs", repos = "http://www.omegahat.org/R", type="source")
library(RGoogleDocs)



gpasswd = "mysecretpassword"
auth = getGoogleAuth("kay.cichini @ gmail.com", gpasswd)
con = getGoogleDocsConnection(auth)

CAINFO = paste(system.file(package="RCurl"), "/CurlSSL/ca-bundle.crt", sep = "")
docs <- getDocs(con, cainfo = CAINFO)

# get file references
hrefs <- lapply(docs, function(x) return(x@access["href"]))
keys <- sub(".*/full/.*%3A(.*)", "\\1", hrefs)
types <- sub(".*/full/(.*)%3A.*", "\\1", hrefs)

# make urls (for url-scheme see: http://techathlon.com/download-shared-files-google-drive/)
# put format parameter for other output formats!
pdf_urls <- paste0("https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=", keys)
doc_urls <- paste0("https://docs.google.com/document/d/", keys, "/export?format=", "txt")

# download documents with your browser
gdoc_ids <- grep("document", types)
lapply(gdoc_ids, function(x) shell.exec(doc_urls[x]))

pdf_ids <- grep("pdf", types, ignore.case = T)
lapply(pdf_ids, function(x) shell.exec(pdf_urls[x]))