dataframe - Importing wikipedia tables in R

Question

I regularly extract tables from Wikipedia. Excel's web import does not work properly for wikipedia, as it treats the whole page as a table. In google spreadsheet, I can enter this:

=ImportHtml("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan","table",3)

and this function will download the 3rd table, which lists all the counties of the UP of Michigan, from that page.

Is there something similar in R? or can be created via a user defined function?

Answer 1

Building on Andrie's answer, and addressing SSL. If you can take one additional library dependency:

library(httr)
library(XML)

url <- "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan"

r <- GET(url)

doc <- readHTMLTable(
  doc=content(r, "text"))

doc[6]