Getting data from the web: scraping

Overview

• Define HTML and CSS selectors
• Introduce the rvest package
• Demonstrate how to extract information from HTML pages
• Practice scraping data

Before class

• Install rvest
• GET AN API KEY
• (optional) Register on geonames
• Chapter 1 and 4 in Web Scraping with R

Several packages are needed for this week’s lectures–you will need to install packages and get API keys

Additional Resources

• rvest documentation
• httr documentation
• Web Scraping using R Cheat Sheet
• More install-and-play API packages for R

Class materials

• Run the code below in your console to download today’s in-class exercises: usethis::use_course("CFSS-MACSS/web-scraping")