[Gretl-devel] grabbing Alfred

Hi, well, not Alfred himself, but "his" data -- I'm talking about the real-time database in St. Louis, of course. I'm working on some functions which would allow to access the Alfred data directly from the (tab-delimited text) files that you can download there, and of course I'm running into problems (which is not unexpected). For example, consider the following attempt to get the latest vintage/publication of each datapoint from the attached partial file: <hansl> nulldata 500 --preserve setobs 12 1960:01 --time-series # monthly =12 in this example join INDPRO_excerpt.txt INDPRO --tkey=observation_date --filter="realtime_end_date==." </hansl> There are at least two issues here already: 1) I had to transform the "observation_date" column to match the monthly frequency in the gretl workfile: Alfred uses the first day of the month to indicate that month, like "1980-02-01" for February 1980. So I chopped off the trailing "-01" part of that column to get gretl-compatible monthly date strings. In the future it would be nice if the join command could do that automatically/internally for the column indicated by the "--tkey" option, in order to support Alfred. (For completeness, for quarterly data it's the same, Alfred writes e.g. "1980-04-01" for 1980Q2.) 2) The above command still produces an error, namely: "join: missing string in filtering" I thought it has to do with the dot "." (which indicates NA in Alfred's text file output, with Alfred's XLS files it's "#NV"), perhaps it wasn't recognized by gretl/join as a string constant. So I replaced these dots with explicit "na" in the text file, changed the --filter option accordingly, but still the same error. This is where I could use some ideas, really! -- Note that the "realtime_end_date" column also holds daily date strings apart from the dots, so maybe gretl gets confused there? Thanks, Sven