Why do I need to use mode = wb with download.file() for this .rds file?

Question

I was getting hung up on Shiny Apps Tutorial Lesson 5 because I was unable to open the counties.rds file. readRDS() threw: error reading fro

Answer 1

My suggestion is to always specify 'mode' regardless and that it pretty safe to always use mode="wb". I argue it the latter should be the default and that the automatic recognition by file extension is faulty and should not be relied upon, cf. https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-August/064739.html