[R] getting a subset corresponding to a list element

[Michael Ashton]

I'm not sure how to ask this with the proper terminology, but here goes:

The BDH() function in RBLPAPI returns, for a list of symbols (e.g., 'SPX Index','RIY Index','IBM Equity') a list of closing prices. The problem is that the result is not a matrix or a dataframe, but a list.

So, if I run the query with 3 symbols, I get a list with 3 elements. For example, in this case, if

symbolist <-c("SPX Index","MXWO Index","MXEA Index")
resultlist <- bdh(symbollist, "PX_LAST", options=opt,start.date=as.Date(begdate))

then resultlist is a list with 3 elements, and as many rows as there are dates between "begdate" and today (or as many month-ends, if "opt" declares monthly periodicity). Suppose in this case I've set this up to retrieve 60 dates.

But I don't WANT a list. I want a zoo object containing each of these as an element. I thought about starting by trying to put each element in a matrix by

data<-matrix(nrow=60,ncol=length(symbollist))

and then looping through from 1 to length(symbolist), letting

data[,i] <- resultlist$symbollist[i][,2]

but this clearly doesn't work since what I really want is

data[,1] <-resultlist$'SPX Index'[,2]
data[,2] <-resultlist$'MXWO Index'[,2]
etc

But there's probably a much easier way to do this.

I am sending this to both the general help list and the r-sig-finance list since there is probably both a general way to stuff a list into a zoo object and a way to do it cleanly with the BDH() command. Thanks in advance for help.

Mike


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