[R] getting R-readable data , not pictures, from US OTS "data" pages

Mike Marchywka marchywka at hotmail.com
Sat Jan 15 14:32:00 CET 2011


Does anyone know offhand if the OTS has an FTP site or other pages
off in a corner somewhere to make data downloading and integration with
R easy? They have mailing lists to which you can subscribe that announce new
data but then you get these things like PDF files
with tables of numbers and the PR releases don't obviously
have links to related csv or other data files. For example,

http://www.ots.treas.gov/?p=StatisticalReleases&ContentRecord_id=1bd8494f-0909-404b-8048-1468f754537f

after surfing for a few moments on their website I still didn't
find any ASCII data files. Now, of course I can run pdftotext on the pdf,
historically with pdf's this has been a huge accomplishment, 
and play games with the jumbled text for a while but I thought there may be a better approach.

If there is enough demand maybe they could put a link to csv files into PR just as with the
pdf file. Tabular pictures are nice but I would imagine R users would benefit if computer readable
data was readily available too. Many gov sites have real data and maybe I just need more coffee. 

Thanks.



note new address
Mike Marchywka
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Marietta GA 30067
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marchywka at hotmail.com
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