My thirst for statistics has been increasing. IV had another requirement, which would eventually be useful to me as well. He currently downloads FII and DII buy and sell values and its impact on Nifty manually in Excel. He suggested me to try and automate this process in R. Wow! Some more learning of R, which would eventually help me in building my strategies!
Unlike in NSE EOD Bhavcopy and BSE EOD Bhavcopy downloaders, I tried a different approach to download FII + DII stats from NSEIndia website (as if I had a choice), along with the index Nifty values and change over previous day. The National Stock Exchange of India has different structures for different pages. To download index values, you have to refer to the link http://www.nseindia.com/content/indices/ind_histvalues.htm whereas for FII and DII stats, you need to visit http://www.nseindia.com/content/equities/eq_fiidii_archives.htm.
Both of these pages are HTML forms, you have to enter parameters like index name, start and end dates. Another challenge is that each of these pages displays a maximum of 100 rows in table and if you need all rows (more than 100), you have to download a csv (dynamically generated in temp location). I faced problem in accessing the csv, as for older dates, the link generated was not valid. Hence, I decided to read the page itself, parse the table to be consumed as data frame. For instances, where the parameters generate more than 100 rows, I decided to use while loop.
OK, now here is the solution for it.
