R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide: Techniques and tools to crawl and scrape data from websites - Softcover

Olgun Aydin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1789138736 ISBN 13: 9781789138733

Publisher: Packt Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

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 Features

• Techniques, tools and frameworks for web scraping with R
• Scrape data effortlessly from a variety of websites
• Learn how to selectively choose the data to scrape, and build your dataset

Book 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 learn

• Write and create regEX rules
• Write XPath rules to query your data
• Learn how web scraping methods work
• Use rvest to crawl web pages
• Store data retrieved from the web
• Learn the key uses of Rselenium to scrape data

Who 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.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Web Scraping
2. XML Path Language and Regular Expression Language
3. Web Scraping with rvest
4. Web Scraping with Rselenium
5. Storing Data and Creating Cronjob

About this title

About the Author

Olgun Aydin is a PhD candidate at the Department of Statistics at Mimar Sinan University, and is studying deep learning for his thesis. He also works as a data scientist.

Olgun is familiar with big data technologies, such as Hadoop and Spark, and is a very big fan of R. He has already published academic papers about the application of statistics, machine learning, and deep learning.

He loves statistics, and loves to investigate new methods and share his experience with other people.

Edition details

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1789138736
• ISBN 13: 9781789138733
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 114