Sometimes data we find on the internet isn’t formatted for downloading and easy importing into our statistical program of choice. It’s simply displayed on a static web page as a table (if we’re lucky) or scattered about the page in various locations. To get this data requires “web scraping”. This means pulling out specific parts of a web page that we want to keep and wrangling into a structure suitable for further analysis. A recently-developed R package called rvest makes this process easier. In this workshop we’ll introduce how to use rvest for scraping web pages by way of several examples. We’ll also present a general strategy for web scraping and demonstrate some basic programming approaches to scraping multi-page web sites. Bring a laptop if you want to work along during the workshop.
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