get_fgindex suddenly very slow

[kramarek]

Here in Germany, we switched to summer time a few days ago. For whatever reason, fetching the Fear and Greed Index suddenly took a very long time. On the computer with Debian Linux it took three minutes. I didn't have this problem with Fedora Linux. I therefore created a few lines of code to download the CSV file offered by alternative.me.

library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)

# FGI data is downloaded directly from alternative.me
url <- "https://api.alternative.me/fng/?limit=0&format=csv"

# Download CSV content and remove empty lines
raw_data <- suppressWarnings(readLines(url))
raw_data <- raw_data[nzchar(raw_data)] 

# Keep only lines with exactly three comma-separated fields
data_lines <- raw_data[grepl("^[^,]+,[^,]+,[^,]+$", raw_data)]

# Create data frame from cleaned lines
df <- read.csv(text = paste(data_lines, collapse = "\n"), header = TRUE)

# Rename columns, convert date format, and clean up data frame
df_clean <- df |> 
  rename(date_time = fng_value,        # Rename 'fng_value' to 'date_time'
         fgi = fng_classification,     # Rename 'fng_classification' to 'fgi'
         fgi_classE = date)  |>        # Rename 'date' to 'fgi_classE'
  mutate(date_time = lubridate::dmy(date_time),  # Convert date to Date format
         fgi = as.integer(fgi))                   # Convert FGI to integer

# Preview cleaned data
head(df_clean)