economagicImport no longer working correctly due to change in economagic.com's data format

[Christopher G. Green]

Greetings,

Economagic.com has changed the format of the HTML representation of some of
their data sets. It seems they have done this to break tools like
economagicImport.

Consider the following (in R 2.7.2 with the current versions of fImport,
etc.).

zzz <- economagicImport("fedny/day-fxus2eu", save=F, freq="daily")

> tail(zzz at data)
           DATE  VALUE
2457 2008-10-03     NA
2458 2008-10-06     NA
2459 2008-10-07     NA
2460 2008-10-08     NA
2461 2008-10-09     NA
2462 2008-10-10 1.3471

If you go to the actual web site

http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/fedny/day-fxus2eu

and look at the source code you will see that they have inserted an entity
representation "&#149;" for '.' in some places (and possibly more "white"
characters). 

>From my five minutes of looking at the source code for economagicImport it
seems like a well-placed 'gsub' to change all of the entities to periods
would fix things (since then the conversion to numeric would work). I
haven't had time to test that idea out, but hopefully I have given you
enough detail to understand what's going on.

Chris Green
________________________________

Christopher G. Green (cggreen AT stat.washington.edu), 
Doctoral Candidate,
Department of Statistics, Box 354322, Seattle, WA, 98195-4322, U.S.A.
http://www.stat.washington.edu/people/cggreen/