Dear All, I have come across a very surprising result as I have started to learn how to use R to pull data from the web for analysis.
I am trying to isolate that table headers for the quarterly income statement (qtrinc) that I pulled from Google finance. I executed the following commands after installing the scrapeR package. require(scrapeR) htmlfile<-scrape(url="http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&fstype=ii",headers=TRUE,parse=TRUE) tables<-xpathSApply(htmlfile[[1]],"//table") qtrinc<-tables[[1]] xpathSApply(qtrinc,"//thead",xmlValue) I receive the result: [1] "\nIn Millions of USD (except for per share items)\n\n\n3 months ending 2010-06-30\n\n\n3 months ending 2010-03-31\n\n\n3 months ending 2009-12-31\n\n\n3 months ending 2009-09-30\n\n\n3 months ending 2009-06-30\n\n" [2] "\nIn Millions of USD (except for per share items)\n\n\n12 months ending 2010-06-30\n\n\n12 months ending 2009-06-30\n\n\n12 months ending 2008-06-30\n\n\n12 months ending 2007-06-30\n\n" [3] "\nIn Millions of USD (except for per share items)\n\n\nAs of 2010-06-30\n\n\nAs of 2010-03-31\n\n\nAs of 2009-12-31\n\n\nAs of 2009-09-30\n\n\nAs of 2009-06-30\n\n" [4] "\nIn Millions of USD (except for per share items)\n\n\nAs of 2010-06-30\n\n\nAs of 2009-06-30\n\n\nAs of 2008-06-30\n\n\nAs of 2007-06-30\n\n" [5] "\nIn Millions of USD (except for per share items)\n\n\n12 months ending 2010-06-30\n\n\n9 months ending 2010-03-31\n\n\n6 months ending 2009-12-31\n\n\n3 months ending 2009-09-30\n\n" [6] "\nIn Millions of USD (except for per share items)\n\n\n12 months ending 2010-06-30\n\n\n12 months ending 2009-06-30\n\n\n12 months ending 2008-06-30\n\n\n12 months ending 2007-06-30\n\n" Interestingly, only the first of these table headers exists in the list qtrinc (if you list(qtrinc) you will see what I mean). These are actually the table headers for all the tables in the object htmlfile. Can someone please help me isolate the table headers for only the object qtrinc? As long as I am at it, I also don't know how to remove the \n characters when calling the data. Help would be much appreciated. --John Sparks, Ph.D. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.