The data on the incidence of influenza-like illness are available from the Web site of the [Réseau Sentinelles](http://www.sentiweb.fr/).
The data on the incidence of influenza-like illness are available from the Web site of the [Réseau Sentinelles](http://www.sentiweb.fr/). We download them as a file in CSV format, in which each line corresponds to a week in the observation period. Only the complete dataset, starting in 1984 and ending with a recent week, is available for download. The URL is: The data on the incidence of influenza-like illness are available from the Web site of the [Réseau Sentinelles](http://www.sentiweb.fr/).
In order to protect us in case the Réseau Sentinelles Web server disappears or is modified, we make a local copy of this dataset that we store together with our analysis. It is unnecessary and even risky to download the data at each execution, because in case of a malfunction we might be replacing our file by a corrupted version. Therefore we download the data only if no local copy exists.
```{r}
data_file = "incidence-PAY-3.csv"
if (!file.exists(data_file)) {
download.file(data_url, data_file, method="auto")
}
```
This is the documentation of the data from [the download site](https://ns.sentiweb.fr/incidence/csv-schema-v1.json):
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@@ -42,7 +52,7 @@ This is the documentation of the data from [the download site](https://ns.sentiw
The first line of the CSV file is a comment, which we ignore with `skip=1`.
```{r}
data = read.csv("incidence-PAY-3.csv", skip=1,na.strings = "-")
data = read.csv(data_file, skip=1,na.strings = "-")