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)

RSelenium

RSelenium is designed to make it easy to connect to a Selenium server or a remote Selenium server. RSelenium allows connection from the R environment to the Selenium Webdriver API. Selenium is a project that focuses on automating web browsers.

Selenium Server is an independent java program that allows you to run HTML test suites in different browsers.

If you want to navigate your website using a browser on the same machine that RSelenium is running on, you need to run Selenium Server on that machine.

RSelenium is one of the most useful poles of R. With just a few lines of code, you can automate web pages and create scraping systems. This is useful for testing web applications as well as for collecting data from multiple web pages.

If you are not familiar with this R library, it will be useful to read the guide created for beginners.

RSelenium is an R library that allows...