R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

Book excerpt: Web Scraping techniques are getting more popular, since data is as valuable as oil in 21st century. Through this book get some key knowledge about using XPath, regEX; web scraping libraries for R like rvest and RSelenium technologies. Key FeaturesTechniques, tools and frameworks for web scraping with RScrape data effortlessly from a variety of websites Learn how to selectively choose the data to scrape, and build your datasetBook Description 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. What you will learnWrite and create regEX rulesWrite XPath rules to query your dataLearn how web scraping methods workUse rvest to crawl web pagesStore data retrieved from the webLearn the key uses of Rselenium to scrape dataWho this book is for This book is for R programmers who want to get started quickly with web scraping, as well as data analysts who want to learn scraping using R. Basic knowledge of R is all you need to get started with this book.