On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 5:20 PM, Sam Steingold <s...@gnu.org> wrote: > I am trying to get stock metadata from Yahoo finance (or maybe there is > a better source?) > here is what I did so far: > > yahoo.url <- "http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?f=j1jka2&s=";; > stocks <- c("IBM","NOIZ","MSFT","LNN","C","BODY","F"); # just some samples > socket <- url(paste(yahoo.url,sep="",paste(stocks,collapse="+")),open="r"); > data <- read.csv(socket, header = FALSE); > close(socket); > data is now: > V1 V2 V3 V4 > 1 200.5B 116.00 166.25 4965150 > 2 19.1M 3.75 5.47 8521 > 3 226.6B 22.73 31.58 57127000 > 4 886.4M 30.80 74.54 226690 > 5 142.4B 3.21 5.15 541804992 > 6 276.4M 11.98 21.30 149656 > 7 55.823B 9.75 18.97 89369000 > > now I need to do this: > > --> convert 55.823B to 55e9 and 19.1M to 19e6 > > parse.num <- function (s) { as.numeric(gsub("M$","e6",gsub("B$","e9",s))); } > data[1]<-lapply(data[1],parse.num); > > seems like awfully inefficient (two regexp substitutions), > is there a better way? > > --> iterate over stocks & data at the same time and put the results into > a hash table: > for (i in 1:length(stocks)) cache[[stocks[i]]] <- data[i,]; > > I do get the right results, > but I am wondering if I am doing it "the right R way". > E.g., the hash table value is a data frame. > A structure(record?) seems more appropriate. >
Check the example at the end of section 2 of the gsubfn vignette: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/gsubfn/vignettes/gsubfn.pdf -- Statistics & Software Consulting GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com ______________________________________________ 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.
