[R-SIG-Finance] Existing packages for personal finance and OFX importation

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 6 June 2010 at 07:36, Brian G. Peterson wrote:
| On 06/05/2010 09:04 AM, Sébastien Durand wrote:
| > -In this package I wish to be able to :
| > 	-Read OFX data
| 
| Assuming we're talking about:
| 
| http://www.ofx.net/
| 
| as identified by Dirk, this is an XML format.
| 
| RSiteSearch("OFX")
| 
| returns zero hits.

Yes but that doesn't mean there's no open source support for it. Just looking
at what my Debian box knows:

edd at ron:~$ apt-cache search ofx
gnucash-docs - Documentation for gnucash, a personal finance tracking program
gnucash-common - A personal finance and money tracking program
grisbi - personal finance management program
homebank-data - Data files for homebank
homebank - Manage your personal accounts at home
aqbanking-tools - basic command line homebanking utilities
libaqbanking-data - configuration files for libaqbanking
libaqbanking-doc - library for online banking applications
libaqbanking-plugins-libgwenhywfar47 - library for online banking applications plugins to libgwenhywfar
libaqbanking29-dbg - library for online banking applications - debug symbols
libaqbanking29-dev - library for online banking applications
libaqbanking29-plugins-qt4 - Qt 4 plugins needed by libaqbanking29
libaqbanking29-plugins-qt - plugins needed by libaqbanking29
libaqbanking29-plugins - plugins needed by libaqbanking29
libaqbanking29 - library for online banking applications
libaqofxconnect5 - library for OFX online banking
libofx-dev - development package for libofx2c2a
libofx4 - library to support Open Financial Exchange
ofx - Open Financial Exchange programs
gnucash-dbg - Debugging symbols for Gnucash
gnucash - A personal finance and money tracking program
skrooge - personal finance manager for KDE
edd at ron:~$ 

I can foresee e.g. a Google Summer of Code 2011 project about writing a
binding to one of those libraries.

That said, someone could of course do it earlier too.

| ... so the first thing to try would be to use the XML package by Duncan to see 
| if you can parse the DTD and and parse the files into R.
| 
| Then there will likely be some work in figuring out what you want the data 
| structures to look like just for handling the input data. I would recommend 
| documenting and packaging the OFX parser as a separate R package, it feels like 
| a standalone package.

Agreed. See above.

This could be of course as a data feeder to blotter et al. 

-- 
  Regards, Dirk