Downloading open data
Before conducting any data analysis, an essential step is to collect high-quality, meaningful data. One important data source is open data, which is selected, organized, and freely available to the public. Most open data is published online in either text format or as APIs. Here, we introduce how to download the text format of an open data file with the download.file function.
Getting ready
In this recipe, you need to prepare your environment with R installed and a computer that can access the Internet.
How to do it…
Please perform the following steps to download open data from the Internet:
- First, visit the http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=%5EGSPC+Historical+Prices link to view the historical price of the S&P 500 in Yahoo Finance:
Figure 1: Historical price of S&P 500
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page, right-click and copy the link in Download to Spreadsheet (the link should appear similar to http://real-chart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=%5EGSPC&d...
