title: Downloading FRED data with quantmod: can dates be specified?
body: <p>I am downloading data from FRED with the <code>quantmod</code> library (author Jeffrey A. Ryan). With <strong>Yahoo</strong> and <strong>Google</strong> data, I am able to set start and end dates. Can the same be done for <strong>FRED</strong> data? </p>
  
  <p>The help page does not list "from" and "to" as options of quantmod's getSymbols function, from which I'm inferring that it is not currently possible.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to set a range for the data to be downloaded or do I need to download the entire dataset and discard the data I don't need?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for your help. Below the code that illustrates the context:</p>
  
  <p>The dates are ignored when downloading from FRED:</p>
  
  <pre><code># environment in which to store data 
  data &lt;- new.env()
  
  # set dates
  date.start &lt;- "2000-01-01"
  date.end &lt;- "2012-12-31"
  
  # set tickers
  tickers &lt;- c("FEDFUNDS", "GDPPOT", "DGS10")
  
  # import data from FRED database
  library("quantmod")
  getSymbols( tickers
    , src = "FRED"  # needed!
    , from = date.start  # ignored
    , to = date.end  # ignored
    , env = data
    , adjust = TRUE
  )
  
  head(data$FEDFUNDS)
  
  head(data$FEDFUNDS)
             FEDFUNDS
  1954-07-01     0.80
  1954-08-01     1.22
  1954-09-01     1.06
  1954-10-01     0.85
  1954-11-01     0.83
  1954-12-01     1.28
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT: Solution</strong></p>
  
  <p>Thanks to <strong>GSee</strong>'s suggestion below, I am using the following code to subset the data to within the range of dates specified above:</p>
  
  <pre><code># subset data to within time range
    dtx &lt;- data$FEDFUNDS
    dtx[paste(date.start,date.end,sep="/")]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here I extracted the xts data from the environment before acting upon it. My follow-up question explores alternatives.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Follow-Up Question</strong></p>
  
  <p>I have asked some follow-up questions there: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15980985/get-xts-objects-from-within-an-environment">get xts objects from within an environment</a></p>