R help - Jun 2009 - How to pass parameters to htmlParse Bank of Canada html pages

To get USDCAD rates from Bank of Canada, we first go

url <- "http://banqueducanada.ca/en/rates/exchange-avg.html"

select 12 months for Rates for the past and click "Get Rates" button.
Then
the page moves to

address <- "http://banqueducanada.ca/cgi-bin/famecgi_fdps"

and the rates show in the html page.

htmlParse() can read the html document but
htmlParse(address) did not work since we need to pass the selected field
value and clicking Get Rates button event parameters to
http://banqueducanada.ca/en/rates/exchange-avg.html.
I was wondering if you know how to load in data from such html pages. Thanks,

-james

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 9:32 PM, <guox at ucalgary.ca>
wrote:
> To get USDCAD rates from Bank of Canada, we first go
>
> url <- "http://banqueducanada.ca/en/rates/exchange-avg.html"
>
> select 12 months for Rates for the past and click "Get Rates"
button. Then
> the page moves to
>
> address <- "http://banqueducanada.ca/cgi-bin/famecgi_fdps"
>
> and the rates show in the html page.
>
> htmlParse() can read the html document but
> htmlParse(address) did not work since we need to pass the selected field
> value and clicking Get Rates button event parameters to
> http://banqueducanada.ca/en/rates/exchange-avg.html.
> I was wondering if you know how to load in data from such html pages.
Thanks,
>
 I'm not sure what package your htmlParse comes from... Anyway, it
seems you want to be able to send form data via a POST request - use
postForm in the RCurl package. That should set you in the right
direction.

Barry