I have many separate data files in csv format for a lot of daily stock prices. Over a few years there are hundreds of those data files, whose names are the dates of data record.
In each file there are variables of ticker (or stock trading code), date, open price, high price, low price, close price, and trading volume. For example, inside a data file named 20150128.txt it looks like this: FB,20150128,1.075,1.075,0.97,0.97,725221 AAPL,20150128,2.24,2.24,2.2,2.24,63682 AMZN,20150128,0.4,0.415,0.4,0.415,194900 NFLX,20150128,50.19,50.21,50.19,50.19,761845 GOOGL,20150128,1.62,1.645,1.59,1.63,684835 ...................and many more.................. In case it's relevant, the number of stocks in these files are not necessarily the same (so there will be missing data). I need to import and create 5 separate time series data frames from those files, one each for Open, High, Low, Close and Volume. In each data frame, rows are indexed by date, and columns by ticker. For example, the data frame Open may look like this: DATE,FB,AAPL,AMZN,NFLX,GOOGL,... 20150128,1.5,2.2,0.4,5.1,1.6,... 20150129,NA,2.3,0.5,5.2,1.7,... ... What will be an efficient way to do that? I've used the following codes to read the files into a list of data frames but don't know what to do next from here. files = list.files(pattern="*.txt") mydata = lapply(files, read.csv,head=FALSE) Thanks, Nathan Disclaimer: In case it's relevant, this question is also posted on stackoverflow. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.