[R-SIG-Finance] EDGAR filing data and corporate actions

[H]

I would like to begin analyzing corporate filings from SEC and also have a need for information on corporate actions such as splits, dividends, ex-dividend dates etc etc. I already have stock price information (but not number of shares outstanding etc.) from another source.

Googling I found the edgar package which allows me to retrieve various information from the EDGAR database given the CIK for a company. One of the functions take a partial company name as an alternative to CIK but I have yet to find a function which takes a partial company name and retrieves any number of CIK numbers for that entity, as well as previous company names etc. Does such a function exist in edgar? Or perhaps in another package? The alternative would be to do this manually on the SEC website but I would rather automate it.

Second, it seems Yahoo Finance has some corporate action data but I did not see that I could retrieve eg ex-dividend dates. Is this possible? Or are there other, better sources that are either free or can be used for a certain number of API calls/day?

Thanks!