Webscraping the data using R - html

Question

Aim: I am trying to scrape the historical daily stock price for all companies from the webpage http://www.nepalstock.com/datanepse/previous.php. The following code works; however, it always generates the daily stock price for the most recent (Feb 5, 2015) date only. In another words, output is the same, irrespective of the date that I entered. I would appreciate if you could help in this regard.
library(RHTMLForms)
library(RCurl)
library(XML)
url <- "http://www.nepalstock.com/datanepse/previous.php"
forms <- getHTMLFormDescription(url)
# we are interested in the second list with date forms
# forms[[2]]
# HTML Form: http://www.nepalstock.com/datanepse/
# Date: [ ]
get_stock<-createFunction(forms[[2]])
#create sequence of dates from start to end and store it as a list
date_daily<-as.list(seq(as.Date("2011-08-24"), as.Date("2011-08-30"), "days"))
# determine the number of elements in the list
num<-length(date_daily)
daily_1<-lapply(date_daily,function(x){
show(x) #displays the particular date
readHTMLTable(htmlParse(get_stock(Date = x)), which = 7)
})
#18 tables out of which 7 is one what we desired
# change the colnames
col_name<-c("SN","Traded_Companies","No_of_Transactions","Max_Price","Min_Price","Closing_Price","Total_Share","Amount","Previous_Closing","Difference_Rs.")
daily_2<-lapply(daily_1,setNames,nm=col_name)
Output:
> head(daily_2[[1]],5)
SN Traded_Companies No_of_Transactions Max_Price Min_Price Closing_Price Total_Share Amount
1 1 Agricultural Development Bank Ltd 24 489 471 473 2,868 1,359,038
2 2 Arun Valley Hydropower Development Company Limited 40 365 360 362 8,844 3,199,605
3 3 Alpine Development Bank Limited 11 297 295 295 150 44,350
4 4 Asian Life Insurance Co. Limited 10 1,230 1,215 1,225 898 1,098,452
5 5 Apex Development Bank Ltd. 23 131 125 131 6,033 769,893
Previous_Closing Difference_Rs.
1 480 -7
2 363 -1
3 303 -8
4 1,242 -17
5 132 -1
> tail(daily_2[[1]],5)
SN Traded_Companies No_of_Transactions Max_Price Min_Price Closing_Price Total_Share Amount Previous_Closing
140 140 United Finance Ltd 4 255 242 242 464 115,128 255
141 141 United Insurance Co.(Nepal)Ltd. 3 905 905 905 234 211,770 915
142 142 Vibor Bikas Bank Limited 7 158 152 156 710 109,510 161
143 143 Western Development Bank Limited 35 320 311 313 7,631 2,402,497 318
144 144 Yeti Development Bank Limited 22 139 132 139 14,355 1,921,511 134
Difference_Rs.
140 -13
141 -10
142 -5
143 -5
144 5

Answer 1

Here's one quick approach. Note that the site uses a POST request to send the date to the server.
library(rvest)
library(httr)
page <- "http://www.nepalstock.com/datanepse/previous.php" %>%
POST(body = list(Date = "2015-02-01")) %>%
html()
page %>%
html_node(".dataTable") %>%
html_table(header = TRUE)