R can directly access data stored as .csv files (and/or other formats) from the web. It is as simple as passing the URL to the fread function.
For example, the following loads data directly from the web into flights_extra:
flights_extra <- fread("http://ourairports.com/data/airports.csv")
There are also dedicated packages to work with web pages. One such example is httr as shown as follows:
install.packages("httr")
library(httr)
rxds <- GET("http://www.rxdatascience.com")
rxds
# View the HTTP headers
headers(rxds)
# View the content
content_rxds <- content(rxds, "text")
substr(content_rxds,1,500)
# Use parsers
str(content(rxds, "parsed"))