Want a quick way to gather data for your projects? Welcome to our guide to web scraping with R, a collection of articles and tutorials which walk you through how to automate grabbing data from the web and unpacking it into a data frame.
The first step is to look at the source you want to scrape. Pull up the “developer tools” section in your favorite web browser and look at the page. Can you find the data you’re looking for?
- If the data is available as a CSV file, you can read it directly from the web.
- If the web page is simple, you can parse it using Readlines() and RCurl package.
- For complex pages, consider using the rvest package to target slices of the page using CSS tags. Web developers use CSS tags (Cascading Style Sheets) to format and decorate content). They are a good way to go after data on news sites and Wikipedia.
- Trying to grab data from a site that uses AJAX? Never fear, this is actually very easy – here’s how to grab data using JSON.
- Web scraping Stock Prices and Financial Data with R
Looking for ways to dig deeper into this topic?
- Check out our list of suggested projects to master web scraping!