Web scraping of stock key stats from Finviz with R

Question

I tried to scrap from Finviz for some stock key stats. I applied codes from the original question: Web scraping of key stats in Yahoo! Finance with R. To collect stats for a

Answer 1

Maybe something in these lines? Trying to filter stocks before using your forloop.

    library(tidyverse)

#AGM.A should produce error
    stocks <- c("AXP","BA","CAT","AGM.A")
    urls <- paste0("http://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=", stocks)

#Test urls with possibly first and find out NAs
    temp_ind <- map(urls, possibly(readLines, otherwise = NA_real_))
    ind <- map_lgl(map(temp_ind, c(1)), is.na)
    ind <- which(ind == TRUE)
    filter.stocks <- stocks[-ind]

#AGM.A is removed and you can just insert stocks which work to for loop.
        filter.stocks
    [1] "AXP" "BA"  "CAT"

As statxiong pointed out url.exist here is simpler version:

library(RCurl)
library(tidyverse)

stocks[map_lgl(urls, url.exists)]