On 3/17/10 6:52 PM, Marshall Feldman wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I can't get the colClasses option to work in the readHTMLTable function
> of the XML package. Here's a code fragment:
>
>   require("XML")
>   doc <- "http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html"
>   table <- getNodeSet(htmlParse(doc),"//table") [[2]]     # The
>   main table is the second one because it's embedded in the page table.
>   xt <- readHTMLTable(
>         table,
>         header =
>   c("peak","trough","contraction","expansion","trough2trough","peak2peak"),
>         colClasses =
>   c("character","character","character","character","character","character"),
>         trim = TRUE
>         )
>
> Does anyone know what's wrong?

The coercion of the table columns is done before the call to
as.data.frame. You can add

stringsAsFactors = FALSE

in the call to readHTMLTable() and you'll get what you expect,
I believe.

 D.

>
>    Marsh Feldman
>
>  [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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