Book Image

R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

By : Olgun Aydin
Book Image

R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

By: Olgun Aydin

Overview of this book

Web scraping is a technique to extract data from websites. It simulates the behavior of a website user to turn the website itself into a web service to retrieve or introduce new data. This book gives you all you need to get started with scraping web pages using R programming. You will learn about the rules of RegEx and Xpath, key components for scraping website data. We will show you web scraping techniques, methodologies, and frameworks. With this book's guidance, you will become comfortable with the tools to write and test RegEx and XPath rules. We will focus on examples of dynamic websites for scraping data and how to implement the techniques learned. You will learn how to collect URLs and then create XPath rules for your first web scraping script using rvest library. From the data you collect, you will be able to calculate the statistics and create R plots to visualize them. Finally, you will discover how to use Selenium drivers with R for more sophisticated scraping. You will create AWS instances and use R to connect a PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS. By the end of the book, you will be sufficiently confident to create end-to-end web scraping systems using R.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we talked about the important rules of RegEx and Xpath. We talked about the general idea of web scraping and web crawling. We then described web scraping techniques, methodologies, and frameworks, before finally introducing the various web scraping environments that are available in R.

In the next chapter, we will learn about XPath rules. We will focus on XPath methodology and how to write XPath rules. We will then learn about the main idea behind these rules and put them into practice. After writing our first RegEx and Xpath rules, we will jump into writing our first web scraper by using R. The RSelenium and rvest libraries are going to be used throughout this book.