R/read-links.R

In fImport: Rmetrics - Importing Economic and Financial Data

# This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
# License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
# version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU Library General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received A copy of the GNU Library General
# Public License along with this library; if not, write to the
# Free Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston,
# MA  02111-1307  USA


###############################################################################
# FUNCTION:               DESCRIPTION:
#  read.links              Uses the links browser to read from a web page
###############################################################################


read.links <-
    function (url, intern = TRUE, bin = NULL, pipe = FALSE, ...) 
{
    # A function implemented by Diethelm Wuertz and Yohan Chalabi

    # Description:
    #   Uses the links browser to read from a web page
    
    # Example:
    #   read.lynx("www.rmetrics.org", bin = "C:/cygwin/bin/lynx.exe")
    
    # FUNCTION:

    # Paste Arguments:
    ldots <- list(...)
    args <- if (length(ldots)) 
        paste(paste("-", names(ldots), "=", sep = ""), ldots, 
            sep = "", collapse = " ")
    else ""
    cmd <- if (is.null(bin)) 
        paste("links", args, "-dump", shQuote(url))
    else paste(bin, args, "-dump", shQuote(url))
    ans <- if (pipe) 
        pipe(cmd)
    else 
        system(cmd, intern = intern)
    ans
}


################################################################################