[R] quantmod Some Single Letter Tickers Not getFin

[Joshua Ulrich]

Hi John,

The financial statement pages exist, but they require the exchange to
be specified.  For example:
http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NYSE:GE
and
http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=GE
take you to the same page, but
http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NYSE:F
works, while
http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=F
results in a 400 'Bad request' error.

This seems to work for this one symbol, maybe it will work for others as well.
getFin("NYSE:F")

Best,
--
Joshua Ulrich  |  FOSS Trading: www.fosstrading.com



On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 10:48 PM, Sparks, John James <jspark4 at uic.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been learning the quantmod package over the last several days.  I
> went to check some of my data pulls against other sources and was
> surprised to find that a few tickers that have single characters do not
> successfully scrape from Google Finance using getFin().  Particularly
>
> require(quantmod)
> getFin("A")
> getFin("E")
> getFin("F")
> getFin("G")
> getFin("M")
>
> all result in a file not found error.  I show the last one below.
>
>> getFin("M")
> Error in download.file(paste(google.fin, Symbol, sep = ""), quiet = TRUE,  :
>  cannot open URL 'http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=M'
> In addition: Warning message:
> In download.file(paste(google.fin, Symbol, sep = ""), quiet = TRUE,  :
>  cannot open: HTTP status was '400 Bad Request'
>
>
> I checked out the financial statement pages for all of these and they
> exist and are as expected:  5 quarters worth of quarterly figures (except
> for cash-flow which has 4 quarters) and 4 years of annual figures.  All
> the rows are also present by comparing a scrape to excel with the figures
> for "Y", which does getFin("Y") without a problem.
>
> I was hoping that someone who knows a lot more about scraping then I do
> could look into this.
>
> Best wishes to all,
> --John Sparks
>
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