[R] simple parsing question?

[Fuchs Ira]

I'm glad I asked as I would have thought that this was a common requirement and quantmod itself or a simple R function would have done the conversion. You saved me from having to master R's sub function. One remaining thing…when I use your snippet for AAPL, I get:

> aapl=getQuote("aapl",what=yahooQF(c("Change Percent (Real-time)")))
> as.numeric(sub("^.* ([-+]?[[:digit:].]+)%$", "\\1", as.character(aapl[[2]])))
[1] -2

not the -2.00 that you got. Do I have a setting that is causing it to not show the significant digits?

Thanks.


On Oct 11, 2012, at 4:27 PM, William Dunlap wrote:

>> qs <- getQuote(c("aapl","tibx","gm","badWolf"),what=yahooQF(c("Change Percent (Real-time)")))
>> qs
>                Trade Time %Change (RT)
> aapl    2012-10-11 04:00:00 N/A - -2.00%
> tibx    2012-10-11 04:00:00 N/A - -0.85%
> gm      2012-10-11 04:00:00 N/A - +1.77%
> badWolf                <NA>  N/A - 0.00%
>> as.numeric(sub("^.* ([-+]?[[:digit:].]+)%$", "\\1", as.character(qs[[2]])))
> [1] -2.00 -0.85  1.77  0.00
> 
> The "\\1" in the replacement argument to sub() means the
> text matched by the first parenthesized subpattern in the pattern
> argument. 
> 
> Bill Dunlap
> Spotfire, TIBCO Software
> wdunlap tibco.com
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf
>> Of Fuchs Ira
>> Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2012 12:58 PM
>> To: r-help at r-project.org
>> Subject: [R] simple parsing question?
>> 
>> I am using the getQuote function in the Quantmod package to retrieve the % change for
>> a stock as follows:
>> 
>>> getQuote("aapl",what=yahooQF(c("Change Percent (Real-time)")))
>>             Trade Time %Change (RT)
>> aapl 2012-10-11 03:41:00 N/A - -1.67%
>> 
>> How can I extract the numeric "change %" which is being returned as a factor so that I
>> can use it in other calculations?
>> 
>> Thanks.
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