5 Apr 2012

A Little Web Scraping Exercise with XML-Package

Some months ago I posted an example of how to get the links of the contributing blogs on the R-Blogger site. I used readLines() and did some string processing using regular expressions.

With package XML this can be drastically shortened -
see this:
# get blogger urls with XML:
library(RCurl)
library(XML)
script <- getURL("www.r-bloggers.com")
doc <- htmlParse(script)
li <- getNodeSet(doc, "//ul[@class='xoxo blogroll']//a")
urls <- sapply(li, xmlGetAttr, "href")
With only a few lines of code this gives the same result as in the original post! Here I will also process the urls for retrieving links to each blog's start page:
# get ids for those with only 2 slashes (no 3rd in the end):
id <- which(nchar(gsub("[^/]", "", urls )) == 2)
slash_2 <- urls[id]

# find position of 3rd slash occurrence in strings:
slash_stop <- unlist(lapply(str_locate_all(urls, "/"),"[[", 3))
slash_3 <- substring(urls, first = 1, last = slash_stop - 1)

# final result, replace the ones with 2 slashes,
# which are lacking in slash_3:
blogs <- slash_3; blogs[id] <- slash_2
p.s.: Thanks to Vincent Zoonekynd for helping out with the XML syntax.

3 comments :

  1. This is very nice. I really enjoyed to read the information. so I need to share with my friends... Keep it up.......

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