rvest is new package that makes it easy to scrape (or harvest) data from html web pages, inspired by libraries like beautiful soup. It is designed to work with magrittr so that you can express complex operations as elegant pipelines composed of simple, easily understood pieces. Install it with:

install.packages("rvest")

rvest in action

To see rvest in action, imagine we’d like to scrape some information about The Lego Movie from IMDB. We start by downloading and parsing the file with html() :

library(rvest) lego_movie <- html("http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1490017/")

To extract the rating, we start with selectorgadget to figure out which css selector matches the data we want: strong span . (If you haven’t heard of selectorgadget, make sure to read vignette("selectorgadget") - it’s the easiest way to determine which selector extracts the data that you’re interested in.) We use html_node() to find the first node that matches that selector, extract its contents with html_text() , and convert it to numeric with as.numeric() :

lego_movie %>% html_node("strong span") %>% html_text() %>% as.numeric() #> [1] 7.9

We use a similar process to extract the cast, using html_nodes() to find all nodes that match the selector:

lego_movie %>% html_nodes("#titleCast .itemprop span") %>% html_text() #> [1] "Will Arnett" "Elizabeth Banks" "Craig Berry" #> [4] "Alison Brie" "David Burrows" "Anthony Daniels" #> [7] "Charlie Day" "Amanda Farinos" "Keith Ferguson" #> [10] "Will Ferrell" "Will Forte" "Dave Franco" #> [13] "Morgan Freeman" "Todd Hansen" "Jonah Hill"

The titles and authors of recent message board postings are stored in a the third table on the page. We can use html_node() and [[ to find it, then coerce it to a data frame with html_table() :

lego_movie %>% html_nodes("table") %>% .[[3]] %>% html_table() #> X 1 NA #> 1 this movie is very very deep and philosophical mrdoctor524 #> 2 This got an 8.0 and Wizard of Oz got an 8.1... marr-justinm #> 3 Discouraging Building? Laestig #> 4 LEGO - the plural neil-476 #> 5 Academy Awards browncoatjw #> 6 what was the funniest part? actionjacksin

Other important functions

If you prefer, you can use xpath selectors instead of css: html_nodes(doc, xpath = "//table//td") ).

Extract the tag names with html_tag() , text with html_text() , a single attribute with html_attr() or all attributes with html_attrs() .

Detect and repair text encoding problems with guess_encoding() and repair_encoding() .

Navigate around a website as if you’re in a browser with html_session() , jump_to() , follow_link() , back() , and forward() . Extract, modify and submit forms with html_form() , set_values() and submit_form() . (This is still a work in progress, so I’d love your feedback.)