Part 2 - Easy ways to collect different types of data from the web with R

Easy ways to collect different types of data from the web with R.

Part 2 - Easy ways to collect different types of data from the web with R

November 9, 2016

The internet is a treasure trove of data, if you know how to collect it. In this two part series of webinars, we will examine easy ways to collect different types of data from the web with R.

In Part 2 we will use the rvest package to extract data that is not provided through an API from the web. How do you collect data that the web developer hasn’t packaged nicely in an API for your consumption? By searching for the data in the page’s HTML structure and extracting it in a surgical way. The rvest package contains several tools that make this process easy and automatable. We will examine these tools along with the background knowledge of HTML and CSS that they depend on.

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About the speaker

Garrett is the author of Hands-On Programming with R and co-author of R for Data Science and R Markdown: The Definitive Guide. He is a Data Scientist at RStudio and holds a Ph.D. in Statistics, but specializes in teaching. He’s taught people how to use R at over 50 government agencies, small businesses, and multi-billion dollar global companies; and he’s designed RStudio’s training materials for R, Shiny, R Markdown and more. Garrett wrote the popular lubridate package for dates and times in R and creates the RStudio cheatsheets.