Traders' Roundtable

I have downloaded a history of the economic releases for the last three years form yahoo intoa text file. I had thought since a text file is not formatted, the downloads would simply save the pre-existing format. Yet, it does not. all hte spacing is changed, making the infromation hard to read. This is perhaps very simple, but does anyone know how I can download the data such that the format (rows, columns) are maintained?? If possible it would save me alot of time as reformatting manually (which i have started) is a pain.

thanks for any ideas.

Perhaps FRED2?

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/

Hi Nathan,

Text files come in few formats and a lot depends on what you are opening the file in – for example, Excel can recognize a lot of different delimiters. If you show a sample of the download and tell me what application you are opening the file with maybe I can help.

basically all i am doing is getting free data off the web page here:

http://biz.yahoo.com/c/e.html

I have started off going back 3 years of weekly data. the format is convenient as it is on the web page.

WHen I copy it into a text file, the formats get messed up making it hard to read, so I am going back and reformatting it manually. THat is more specifically what I am doing. A basic thing i am very sure yet, my way seems very ineffecient.

I will look at that econ site mentioned, thanks for pointing it out.

Hi Nathan,

I presume that you mean data like this: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Pre ... e/exh2.txt ? (I just followed a link at random from the main page)

I just did the following:
1. copied that page referenced above to a text file;
2. Opened Excel and imported it as a delimited file with space as the delimiter.

And Bingo! Useable data! Took longer to write this that actually do it.

Assuming that the data I selected is the type that you are having trouble with, PM me and I will step you through doing it yourself.