I'm trying to get R to download the data from here: http://www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/report_format/latest-July-2015-New-Format.xml
# install and load the necessary package install.packages("XML") library(XML) # Save the URL of the xml file in a variable xml.url <- "http://www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/report_format/latest-July-2015-New-Format.xml" # Use the xmlTreePares-function to parse xml file directly from the web xmlfile <- xmlTreeParse(xml.url) # the xml file is now saved as an object you can easily work with in R: class(xmlfile) # Use the xmlRoot-function to access the top node xmltop = xmlRoot(xmlfile) # have a look at the XML-code of the first subnodes: print(xmltop)[1:3] Everything seems fine up to that point. The next line seems to NOT parse the data as I thought it would. # To extract the XML-values from the document, use xmlSApply: datacat <- xmlSApply(xmltop, function(x) xmlSApply(x, xmlValue)) I did some research on this, and it seemed to work in other examples of xml data. I guess this data set is different...or I just don't understand this well enough to know what's really going on... Basically, I want to get this: xmltop Into a data table. How can I do that? Thanks. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list