There seems to be an error with the getBM function in biomaRt. The below code was working 3 days ago and now returns an error message. Any help would be appreciated. I'm working in R (version 3.6.0).
mart <- biomaRt::useMart(biomart = "ensembl", + dataset = "hsapiensgeneensembl", + host = 'http://www.ensembl.org')
ttg <- biomaRt::getBM( + attributes = c('mirbaseaccession', + 'mirbaseid', + 'mirbasetransname'), + mart = mart)
Error in biomaRt::getBM(attributes = c("mirbaseaccession", "mirbaseid", : The query to the BioMart webservice returned an invalid result: biomaRt expected a character string of length 1.
The same problem happens to me right now, and it happened to me a couple of weeks ago too. . it's related to the web server of Ensembl, it's not working well. Hope there is a solution... Maybe it's a matter of time.
one solution I found was to use a different host, or alternate to whichever is working. host = 'http://useast.ensembl.org'