Programatically get latest stable R release version number

Question

How can I use R to get the most recent release of R? I know about the gtools::checkRVersion but was hoping for a base solution, even better one that doesn't rely on scraping/regex.

The desired result as of today (2015-06-13) would be: 3.2.0

Answer 1

Another potential alternative: CRAN has a dcf file with version information. I'm not sure how reliably it is updated though.

R> tmp <- tempfile()
R> download.file("http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/VERSION-INFO.dcf", tmp)
R> (x <- read.dcf(tmp))
     Release Old-release Devel  
[1,] "3.2.0" "3.1.3"     "3.3.0"