[R] Extracting information from webpages

[Scott Waichler]

> Hello R Community,
> 
> I would like to be able to download recent (yesterday's close is fine)
> stock and 
> mutual fund prices from somewhere and use them for a personal finance
> project. 
> Ideally, I would do this at a website of my choosing (e.g.
> morningstar.com) and
> have the possibility of getting a wide range of other information about
> the security 
> as well.  I see there is a package httpRequest that should allow me to 
> retrieve the webpage with an posted security symbol.  I looked at package 
> XML for processing the returned webpage, but it didn't work on an 
> example *.asp file that I tried.  I also checked out the nascent package
> fBasics, 
> but I didn't find what I'm looking for.  I know there is a Perl module
> Finance::Quote; 
> should I go that route and avoid trying to parse webpages?  I was hoping
> to learn 
> how to extract information from webpages in general so I could apply the
> techniques 
> for other purposes too.
> 
> Thanks,
> Scott Waichler
> scott at lifetime.oregonstate.edu
> ***********************************************************************
>