Uses the Lynx Browser to read a web page.
read.lynx(url, intern = TRUE, bin = NULL, pipe = FALSE, ...)the downloaded text
a character string specifying the URL of the web page.
a logical which indicates whether to make the output of the command an R object.
a string with the path of your lynx binary or NULL if lynx binary is available in the operating system path.
a logical which indicates whether the result should be returned
as a pipe() commmand.
optional arguments passed to lynx binary. For example
accept_all_cookies = TRUE or
cookie_file="~/.lynx_cookies". For a list of options, see
the lynx manual page.
Diethelm Wuertz, Yohan Chalabi, and Andrew Ellis, (2010); Financial Market Data for R/Rmetrics, Rmetrics eBook, Rmetrics Association and Finance Online, Zurich, www.rmetrics.org.
Alternative text browser functions are the Rmetrics functions
read.links and read.w3m.
To download xls and xlsx spread sheets use the
functions gdata::read.xls and xlsx::read.xlsx
from the contributed packages gdata and xlsx,
respectively.
To download text files line by line use the Rmetrics function
read.lines which wraps the function readLines
from R's base evironment.
To postprocess downloaded files use the Rmetrics functions
indexGrep, dataSplit,
charvecSplit, and stringSplit.