Getting specific line from Cash Flow

Question

I'm trying to get data from Cash Flow with getFinancials function in R.

library(quantmod)
s <- c("AAPL","GOOG","IBM","GS","AMZN","GE")
fin <- lapply(s, getFinancials, auto.assign=FALSE)
names(fin) <- s

But when I try to get a specific line with

fin$AAPL$CF$A["Cash from Operating Activities"]
fin$AAPL$CF$A["Capital Expenditures"]

I get a NA return. How can I get these specific lines from the Cash Flow?

Answer 1

Since fin$AAPL$CF$A is a matrix, you need a comma after the name because you are asking for a row name. Without a comma you are asking for a vector element named "Cash from Operating Activities", and since we have a matrix the individual elements are not named.

class(fin$AAPL$CF$A)
# [1] "matrix"
"Cash from Operating Activities" %in% rownames(fin$AAPL$CF$A)
# [1] TRUE

## no comma - NA because "Cash from Operating Activities" is not a named vector element
fin$AAPL$CF$A["Cash from Operating Activities"]
# [1] NA

This can be more easily illustrated with

x <- 1
x["x"]
# [1] NA

Since x has no named element "x", we get NA. You want the following.

## with comma - asking for the row "Cash from Operating Activities"
fin$AAPL$CF$A["Cash from Operating Activities", ]
# 2014-09-27 2013-09-28 2012-09-29 2011-09-24 
#      59713      53666      50856      37529 

Since these are matrices, rows are requested on the left side of the comma, columns on the right, and single named elements with no comma.