Dear all, I am trying to use the biomaRt package to access the data from Ensembl, however I got error message when using the useDataset() function. My codes are shown below.

library(httr)
listMarts()
ensembl = useMart("ENSEMBL_MART_ENSEMBL")
listDatasets(ensemble)
ensembl = useDataset("hsapiens_gene_ensembl",mart = ensemble)

When I type useDataset function i got error message like this:

> ensembl1 <- useEnsembl(biomart = "ENSEMBL_MART_ENSEMBL",dataset = "hsapiens_gene_ensembl")
Ensembl site unresponsive, trying asia mirror
Error in textConnection(text, encoding = "UTF-8") : 
  invalid 'text' argument

and sometimes another different error message showed as:

> ensembl = useDataset("hsapiens_gene_ensembl",mart = ensembl)
Ensembl site unresponsive, trying asia mirror
Error in textConnection(bmResult) : invalid 'text' argument

it seems like that the mirror automatically change to asia OR useast OR uswest, but the error message still shows up over and over again, and i don't know what to do.

So if anyone could help me with this? I will be very grateful for any help or suggestion.

Kind regards Riley Qiu, Dongguan, China