On Dec 13, 2007, at 9:16 PM, Farrel Buchinsky wrote: > I am afraid not! The only thing I know about Python (or Perl, Ruby > etc) is that they exist and that I have been able to download some > amazing freeware or open source software thanks to their existence. > The XML package and specifically the xmlTreeParse function looks as > if it is begging to do the task for me. Is that not true?
Certainly - probably as a better Python programmer than an R programmer, it's faster and neater for me to do it in Python: from elementtree.ElementTree import XML import urllib url = 'http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/erss.cgi? rss_guid=0_JYbpsax0ZAAPnOd7nFAX-29fXDpTk5t8M4hx9ytT-' con = urllib.urlopen(url) dat = con.read() root = XML(dat) items = root.findall("channel/item") for item in items: category = item.find("category") print category.text The problem is that the RSS feed you linked to, does not contain the year of the article in an easily accessible XML element. Rather you have to process the HTML content of the description element - which, is something R could do, but you'd be using the wrong tool for the job. In general, if you're planning to analyze article data from Pubmed I'd suggest going through the Entrez CGI's (ESearch and EFetch) which will give you all the details of the articles in an XML format which can then be easily parsed in your language of choice. This is something that can be done in R (the rpubchem package contains functions to process XML files from Pubchem, which might provide some pointers) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Rajarshi Guha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GPG Fingerprint: 0CCA 8EE2 2EEB 25E2 AB04 06F7 1BB9 E634 9B87 56EE ------------------------------------------------------------------- Writing software is more fun than working. ______________________________________________ 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.
