Retain hyperlink URLs from text column

[k5cents]

Is there a way readxl could retain the hyperlinks from the Excel XML data? Not sure how you'd present that in a data frame, but maybe it could be extracted with a different function?

library(readxl)
library(fs)
url <- "https://www.michigan.gov/documents/web_contract_12037_7.xls"
download.file(url, tmp <- file_temp(ext = path_ext(url)))
sht <- excel_sheets(tmp)[2]
dat <- read_excel(tmp, sht)
#> New names:
#> * Name -> Name...3
#> * Name -> Name...5
head(dat$`Links To Contracts`)
#> [1] "View Contract" "View Contract" "View Contract" "View Contract"
#> [5] "View Contract" "View Contract"

^{Created on 2020-06-18 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[jennybc]

I'm not thinking about readxl at the moment, but I can imagine what's going on here because there's a similar phenomenon in Google Sheets (tidyverse/googlesheets4#172).

The long-term solution would be to create an official column type around hyperlink cells. And then, if readxl had a richer col spec interface, there is the additional possibility of expressing whether you want link text, URL, or both.

But I'm afraid in the meantime, your best bet is to use something like tidyxl (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidyxl/index.html) to get all the gory details of the cell, where I expect you can find the URLs.

[nacnudus]

Very sorry but I never got around to hyperlinks in tidyxl. There's an old issue that was waiting for someone to need them. nacnudus/tidyxl#42.