suggestion for new function: forecastfromweb

[hgerritsen]

It took me a long time to figure out how to replicate the forecast from stockassessment.org exactly on a pc. Maybe it is possible to include the line RNGkind(sample.kind = "Rounding") to the standard forecast script to make it robust to both pc and stockassessment.org. But an alternative is to allow users to download the forecast object directly from stockassessment.org.
I have adapted the fitfromweb function to do this (below). Is this something you would consider including in the package?

forecastfromweb <- function (stockname, character.only = FALSE, return.all = FALSE) 
{
    if (!character.only) 
        stockname <- as.character(substitute(stockname))
    con <- url(sub("SN", stockname, "https://stockassessment.org/datadisk/stockassessment/userdirs/user3/SN/run/forecast.RData"))
    e <- new.env()
    nam <- load(con, e)
    close(con)
    if (return.all) 
        return(e)
    hasFC <- grepl("^FC$", nam)
    if (!any(hasFC)) {
        warning(sprintf("No object named FC. Found %s in model.RData.", 
            paste0(nam, collapse = ", ")))
        return(NA)
    }
    else if (length(nam) > 1) {
        message(sprintf("Not returning %s from model.RData", 
            paste0(nam[!hasFC], collapse = ", ")))
    }
    return(e$FC)
}