[R] problems reading XML type file from ishares website

[Jeff Newmiller]

XLS has nothing to do with XML. The shift from XLS to XLSX/XLSM formats was where XML was introduced. You might occasionally find mislabelled files that seem to work anyway, but there is a significant difference inside true XLS files. 

Use a package designed to handle your data format. There are a few, and most seem to require external software support  (e.g. Perl or Java or Windows OS), so you have to decide what overhead support headaches you can tolerate. 
-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On July 28, 2016 6:14:28 AM PDT, "Bos, Roger" <roger.bos at rothschild.com> wrote:
>The ishares website has the S&P 500 stocks you can download as a XLS
>file, which opens fine in Excel, but I am not able to open it in R due
>to what seems to be invalid XML formatting.   I tried using XLConnect
>and XML as shown below.  Does anyone know a workaround or can point out
>what I am doing wrong.  Here is my reproducible code:
>
>temp <- "https://www.ishares.com/us/239726/fund-download.dl"
>fname <- "ivv.xls"
>download.file(url = temp, destfile = fname)
>readWorksheetFromFile(fname)
>library(XML)
>xmlfile <- xmlTreeParse(fname)
>
>09:06:17 > readWorksheetFromFile(fname)
>Error: InvalidFormatException (Java): Your InputStream was neither an
>OLE2 stream, nor an OOXML stream
>09:06:17 > library(XML)
>09:06:25 > xmlfile <- xmlTreeParse(fname)
>Opening and ending tag mismatch: Style line 14 and Style
>Error: 1: Opening and ending tag mismatch: Style line 14 and Style
>
>
>Thanks in advance, Roger
>
>
>
>
>
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