Hello all,
We've received recent reports that attempts to download tables and files using our older R client are not working as expected. Users are experiencing errors with the `synGet` and `synTableQuery` commands (and possibly others) and the error returned typically includes something about a failed regex and some details about the query that failed. For example:
```
Error in gsub(paste("
?", queryString, "$", sep = ""), "", tmp) :
invalid regular expression '?response-content-disposition=........
```
We have identified the root cause and have a recommended fix for all impacted users. Here is a statement from our Director of Engineering @brucehoff:
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In support of R users wishing to access data in Synapse, in Feb., 2018 we released the initial version of the 'synapser' package. This replaced the previous 'synapseClient' package, incorporating newer features of Synapse. Over the past year we have continued to develop and support 'synapser' while encouraging our users to migrate from the previous package to the new one. To avoid interrupting your work we avoided disabling the old package, allowing your scripts/processes to continue as before. However we have not made any updates, nor have we released the package for the newest versions of the R language.
On or about March 29, a change in the interface to Amazon Web Services causes the old package no longer to work for certain operations, like downloading files and querying tables. The solution is to switch to our newer, supported package, 'synapser'. Installation instructions can be found here: https://r-docs.synapse.org/.
While the instruction set for the new package is not identical, it is quite similar to that of the previous package and our users have reported a minimal amount of work switching their code to the new package. As always, if you have any questions or difficulties, please reach our to the Synapse support staff.
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Please let us know if you have any additional questions or need assistance with your upgrade process.
Best,
Meredith
@meredith