[Question/Feature Request] Getting contents or copying binary blob #460
Description
I am trying to use git2r to extract individual files from repository history for the purpose of comparing R objects through the repository history (for instance, for comparing model performance different versions of models saved as .rds files in the repo). In some cases I am extracting subdirectories and so working through the git_tree recursively. I do not want to overwrite the working copies of these files, but copy them to a location of my choosing.
I am able to use git2r::content() to read an individual text file blobs, which can then be written to files. However, it returns NA if the blob/file is binary. I would like to be able to either (a) return a raw vector of binary data from git2r::content(), or (b) copy the blobs to files directly without reading them in, perhaps by having a version of the C function blob_content_to_file exposed to the R API. The latter would be more efficient as it avoids the read-write cycle into R, though I think the former would be easiest to implement.
I may be able to implement the latter as a PR but my C skills are limited. If I can and you are interested, would you prefer content() to return a raw vector for binary data, or for content() to be type-stable and aseparate content_raw() function be used for binary files?
Alternatively, there may be a way to do this with checkout() or another function that I've missed, but I've not figured it out.
Thanks for this excellent and long-maintained package!