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I have looked through the documentation and don't see this addressed, but since some of you seem to have knowledge of undocumented features, I thought I'd ask. There is a zip file at http://www.retrosheet.org/gamelogs/gl2015.zip. It extracts to a single file, GL2015.TXT (even though it's a CSV).

I want to get this into a Dataset. If I unzip the file and place it on my hard drive somewhere then this works (where retfor is a list containing the types of each column in the dataset): 

gl15 = SemanticImport["/GL2015.TXT", retfor, "Dataset"]

I'd like to be able to read the zip file directly from the website and not download and extract it to my hard drive. With Import you can use the following:

gl15 = Import["http://www.retrosheet.org/gamelogs/gl2015.zip","*"]

Any ideas?

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    $\begingroup$ You can build such a function by combining Import, ExtractArchive, DeleteFile (to remove the zip file) and SemanticImport, is that ok or is that what you are trying to avoid? $\endgroup$
    – C. E.
    May 8, 2016 at 13:13
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, currently I'm using URLSave, ExtractArchive,SemanticImport and DeleteFile but it seems kludgy. $\endgroup$
    – G. Pelkabo
    May 8, 2016 at 14:09

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If you don't want to save the file to the disk, you can use stream to do the trick. You can import the zip file as a string from the web and convert it to stream, which then can be treated as a file.

For example:

url="http://www.retrosheet.org/gamelogs/gl2015.zip";
str=Import[url, "String"];
filename = First@Import[StringToStream[str], "ZIP"];

SemanticImportString[Import[StringToStream[str],{"ZIP", filename, "String"}]]
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