[R-SIG-Finance] getSymbols for FRED in quantmod has stopped working???

[Paul Gilbert]

The discussion on R-pkg-devel has been about how to fix default 
download.file behaviour that has previously worked on all platforms, and 
is now broken by a very recent change at the St Louis Fed. A method 
working a few days ago would not be a guarantee that it still works. 
Before people go overboard changing their workflow, let me point out 
that this can likely be fixed by a user setting

    options(download.file.method="libcurl")
or
    options(download.file.method="wget")
or
    options(download.file.method="wininet")

See ?download.file  for more options, which will be platform specific 
(but maybe not as specific as using an excel macro).

The package developer problem is slightly different. That problem, the 
problem that Joshua is working on, is that the default method no longer 
works. So either the default method has to be fixed or users need to be 
directed to some solution that will depend on their platform.

Paul

On 07/03/2015 12:05 PM, Daniel Melendez wrote:
> As a suggestion ( although not that efficient ) there is an excel macro
> that can download the information.  I'm not sure if you're aware of it or
> not but just thought I'd mention it just in case.
>
> https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred-addin/
>
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Joshua Ulrich <josh.m.ulrich at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 3:17 AM, Alexander Gracian <agracian at yahoo.co.uk>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>> I have started getting an error when using getSymbols for FRED in
>> quantmod. It was working fine a few weeks ago. I'm using R on a Mac:
>>> getSymbols("CPIAUCSL", src="FRED")Error in download.file(paste(FRED.URL,
>> "/", Symbols[[i]], "/", "downloaddata/",  :   cannot open URL '
>> http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIAUCSL/downloaddata/CPIAUCSL.csv
>> '
>>> If I paste the URL in the error message into a browser it downloads the
>> csv fine, so I think the url is ok.It also works ok for other sources, such
>> as yahoo etc.
>>
>> The FRED http:// URLs now redirect to https://.  That causes issues
>> with the default method for download.file on some platforms.  I'm
>> aware of the issue and working on a fix.
>>
>> See the conversation on R-package-devel if you're interested in the
>> details:
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2015q3/000193.html
>>
>>> Any insights would be appreciated.
>>> Thanks,Alex
>>>          [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Joshua Ulrich  |  about.me/joshuaulrich
>> FOSS Trading  |  www.fosstrading.com
>>
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>
>
>