[R] Reading in an XLS (really XML) file from website

[Bos, Roger]

All,

I am trying to read the S&P 500 constituents from the iShares website using the following code:

   URL <- "http://www.ishares.com/us/239726/fund-download.dl"
   setInternet2(TRUE)
   download.file(url=URL, destfile="temp.xls")
   out <- readWorksheetFromFile(file="temp.xls", sheet="Holdings", header=TRUE, startRow=13)

R returns the following error:

>    out <- readWorksheetFromFile(file="temp.xls", sheet="Holdings", header=TRUE, startRow=13)
Error: IllegalArgumentException (Java): Your InputStream was neither an OLE2 stream, nor an OOXML stream
In addition: Warning message:
In download.file(url = URL, destfile = "temp.xls") :
  downloaded length 1938303 != reported length 200

Upon further examination this is because the format is really XML.  Is there any way to get XLConnect or any other excel reader to read in an XML file?  I thought XML was for new Excel format.

Barring that, can we read in the file using the XML package? I tried the following code...

   require(XML)
   tmp <- xmlParse(URL)

... but I get this error:

Opening and ending tag mismatch: Style line 14 and Style
Error: 1: Opening and ending tag mismatch: Style line 14 and Style

Thanks in advance for any help or hints,

Roger



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