timeSeries (version 4041.111)

readSeries: Read a 'timeSeries' from a text file

Description

Reads a file in table format and creates a "timeSeries" object from it. The first column of the table must hold the timestamps.

Usage

readSeries(file, header = TRUE, sep = ";", zone = "", 
    FinCenter = "", format, ...)

Value

an object of class "timeSeries"

Arguments

file

the filename of a spreadsheet dataset from which to import the data records.

header

a logical value indicating whether the file contains the names of the variables as its first line. If missing, the value is determined from the file format: 'header' is set to 'TRUE' if and only if the first row contains one fewer fields than the number of columns.

sep

the field seperator used in the spreadsheet file to separate columns, by default ";". If sep = ";" and reading the series fails, then the reading is automatically repeated with sep=",".

zone

the time zone or financial center where the data were recorded. By default zone = "" which is short for GMT.

FinCenter

a character with the the location of the financial center named as "continent/city".

format

a character string with the format in POSIX notation specifying the timestamp format. The format has not to be specified if the first column in the file has the timestamp format specifier, e.g. "%Y-%m-%d" for the short ISO 8601 format.

...

Additional arguments passed to read.table() which is used to read the file.

Details

The file is imported with read.table. Note the different default for argument "sep".

The first column of the table must hold the timestamps. Format of the timestamps can be either specified in the header of the first column or by the format argument.

See Also

as.timeSeries, timeSeries, dummyMonthlySeries, dummyDailySeries

Examples

## full path to an example file
fn <- system.file("extdata/msft.csv", package = "timeSeries")
## first few lines of the file
readLines(fn, n = 5)

## import the file
msft <- readSeries(fn)
head(msft)

## is msft the same as the data object MSFT?
all.equal(msft, MSFT) 
## ... almost, except for slot 'documentation'
c(msft@documentation, MSFT@documentation)
## actually, all.equal() says 'attribute', not slot. this is ok too:
c(attr(MSFT, "documentation"), attr(msft, "documentation"))
## make 'documentation' equal, here "", and compare again:
msft@documentation <- ""
all.equal(msft, MSFT) # TRUE