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

[Raghuraman Ramachandran]

This works:
Change the destination directory to suit you.

MyURL1 = "http://www.ishares.com/us/239726/fund-download.dl"
download.file(MyURL1,paste("C:/Data/Rtest1",date1,"r.xls",sep=""),method="wget",quiet=TRUE,mode="wb",
                         extra="--header=\"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0
(X11; Linux x86_64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0\"")

Cheers
Raghu


On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 4:01 PM, Bos, Roger <roger.bos at rothschild.com> wrote:
> 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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