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 focused on the fundamentals of cloud computing. We have learned how to create AWS Instances and how to connect PostgreSQL database, which is hosted on AWS, by using R. Finally, we focused on creating cronjobs on R. Now you are able to create end-to-end web scraping system by using R.

In this book, we covered main topics regarding web scraping with R. We talked about the main idea behind web scraping, learned how Regex rules work, and learned how to use XPath rules and how to write them. We have created our first web-scraping script using the rvest library and even created a graph, using collected data.

Finally, we discussed about Selenium. Using the RSelenium library, we created a web scrapper on top of R. Then, we took a look at how to store the data we collected and how to schedule our web-scraping tools on R.

So, now you are ready to build your...