Also you might want to use read.zoo from the zoo package which will read the file in and will convert the dates at the same time into a zoo object. Something like:
library(zoo) z <- read.zoo("myfile.csv", header = TRUE, sep = ",", format = "%m/%d/%Y") Or rather than creating files you may wish to use the quantmod package which has facilities for directly reading such data from the web. On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 1:47 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murd...@stats.uwo.ca> wrote: > On 14/12/2008 12:38 PM, doloop wrote: >> >> Hello, I am relatively new to using R. I am using R version 2.8.0. I >> have a >> program that downloads stock data from Yahoo! Finance and stores it to a >> text file on my hard drive. The text file contains the date, opening >> price, >> high price, low price, closing price, volume and adjusted price (i.e., >> adjusted for dividends and splits). I want to read and manipulate the >> data >> in R. However, when I use read.table, it treats all of the data as >> "factors" and I do not know how to treat the data as numbers: >> >>> spy<-read.table("c:\\StockData\\SPY.txt") >>> attach(spy) >>> names(spy)<-c("QDate","OpenP","HighP","LowP","CloseP","Vol","AdjP") >>> spy[1,] >> >> QDate OpenP HighP LowP CloseP Vol AdjP >> 1 12/14/2006, 141.86, 143.24, 141.84, 143.12, 64755200, 138.34 > > Notice the commas: they are being read as part of the data, not as > separators. I imagine you need to use read.csv, not read.table, or specify > sep="," to the latter. > > Once you're reading the data properly, you can convert to a number using > as.numeric(as.character( f )), where f is the factor. Don't just use > as.numeric(f); that will just extract the internal encoding. > > Duncan Murdoch > >>> ChangeFromOpen<-spy[1,5]-spy[1,2] >> >> Warning message: >> In Ops.factor(spy[1, 5], spy[1, 2]) : - not meaningful for factors >> As you can see, I cannot calculate the difference between the closing >> price >> and the opening price, (much less compute averages, etc). This is clearly >> a >> "newbie" problem. In my defense, I am using the book by Michael Crawley >> (The R Book) as my teaching guide, but I cannot find the answer to this >> question in that rather densely packed book. >> >> Any help is appreciated. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.