Get startedGet started for free

Create valid name for one instrument

If you are only downloading data for a single symbol and that symbol is not a syntactically valid name, you can set auto.assign = FALSE in your call to getSymbols(). That will allow you to directly assign the output to a syntactically valid name.

You may also want to convert the column names to syntactically valid names. That is a good idea if you plan to use the data in functions that expect column names to be syntactically valid names (e.g. lm()).

This exercise is part of the course

Importing and Managing Financial Data in R

View Course

Exercise instructions

  • Use getSymbols() and its auto.assign argument to create an object named BRK.A containing data for "BRK-A".
  • Use colnames() to create an object named col_names that contains the column names for the BRK.A object.
  • Use make.names() to convert col_names to syntactically valid names.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Create BRK.A object


# Create col_names object from the colnames() of BRK.A
col_names <- 

# Convert col_names into syntactically valid names
colnames(BRK.A) <- 
Edit and Run Code