I am afraid not! The only thing I know about Python (or Perl, Ruby etc) is
that they exist and that I have been able to download some amazing freeware
or open source software thanks to their existence.
The XML package and specifically the xmlTreeParse function looks as if it is
begging to do the task for me. Is that not true?

On Dec 13, 2007 9:12 PM, Rajarshi Guha <rguha@indiana.edu> wrote:

>
> On Dec 13, 2007, at 9:03 PM, Farrel Buchinsky wrote:
>
> > I would like to track in which journals articles about a particular
> > disease
> > are being published. Creating a pubmed search is trivial. The search
> > provides data but obviously not as an R dataframe. I can get the
> > search to
> > export the data as an xml feed and the xml package seems to be able
> > to read
> > it.
> >
> > xmlTreeParse("
> > http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/erss.cgi?
> > rss_guid=0_JYbpsax0ZAAPnOd7nFAX-29fXDpTk5t8M4hx9ytT-
> > ",isURL=TRUE)
> >
> > But getting from there to a dataframe in which one column would be
> > the name
> > of the journal and another column would be the year (to keep things
> > simple)
> > seems to be beyond my capabilities.
>
> If you're comfortable with Python (or Perl, Ruby etc), it'd be easier
> to just extract the required stuff from the raw feed - using
> ElementTree in Python makes this a trivial task
>
> Once you have the raw data you can read it into R
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Rajarshi Guha  <rguha@indiana.edu>
> GPG Fingerprint: 0CCA 8EE2 2EEB 25E2 AB04  06F7 1BB9 E634 9B87 56EE
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours.
>        -- Milton Berle
>
>
>


-- 
Farrel Buchinsky
GrandCentral Tel: (412) 567-7870

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