Scraping a Table on https site using R
Last Updated :
21 Mar, 2023
In this article, we have discussed the basics of web scraping using the R language and the rvest and tidyverse libraries. We have shown how to extract tables from a website and how to manipulate the resulting data. The examples in this article should provide a good starting point for anyone looking to scrape tables from websites. The following are the key concepts related to scraping tables in R:
- Web scraping with R: R provides various libraries such as rvest and XML that can be used to extract data from websites.
- Reading HTML: R can read HTML pages, and these pages can be parsed to extract the data we are interested in.
- Selectors: To extract data from a website, we need to know the HTML structure of the page. Selectors in R allow us to select elements from the HTML page using CSS selectors or XPath.
- Parsing HTML: After selecting the elements of interest, the next step is to parse the HTML content and extract the data.
Before we start scraping tables, the following prerequisites must be met, R should be installed on the system. The rvest library must be installed in R. If it’s not installed, it can be installed by running the following command in the R console:
install.packages("rvest")
Scraping a Table from a Static Website
In this example, we use the read_html function to read the HTML content of the website. Then we use the html_nodes function to select the table using a CSS selector. Finally, we extract the table content using the html_table function and print the first six rows of the table.
R
library (rvest)
List_of_countries_by_GDP_ (PPP)_per_capita")
table_node <- html_nodes (webpage, "table" )
table_content <- html_table (table_node)[[2]]
head (table_content)
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Output:
Scraping a Table from a Dynamic Website
Scraping a table from a dynamic website, which is generated using JavaScript. In this example, the rvest library is used to read the HTML code of the webpage and extract the table. The html_nodes function is used to select the first table on the page, and the html_table function is used to convert the HTML code into a DataFrame. Finally, the first few rows of the data frame are displayed using the head function.
R
library (rvest)
library (tidyverse)
population-by-country/"
html_code <- read_html (url)
table_html <- html_code %>% html_nodes ( "table" ) %>% .[[1]]
table_df <- table_html %>% html_table ()
head (table_df)
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Output:
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