AE 08: Scraping articles from the Cornell Review

Suggested answers

Application exercise
Answers
Modified

September 30, 2026

Packages

We will use the following packages in this application exercise.

  • {tidyverse}: For data import, wrangling, and visualization.
  • {rvest}: For scraping HTML files.
  • {robotstxt}: For verifying if we can scrape a website.

Data scraping

See the code below stored in scrape-cornell-review.R.

# load packages
library(tidyverse)
library(rvest)
library(robotstxt)
library(here)

# check that we can scrape data from the cornell review
paths_allowed("https://www.thecornellreview.org/")

# read the first page
page <- read_html("https://www.thecornellreview.org/")

# extract desired components
titles <- html_elements(x = page, css = ".cr-side-title a") |>
  html_text2()

# text field cannot separate dates from authors - have to do it manually
dates_authors <- html_elements(x = page, css = ".cr-side-content .cr-meta") |>
  html_text2()

topics <- html_elements(x = page, css = ".cr-side-thumb .cr-image-cat-small") |>
  html_text2()

post_urls <- html_elements(x = page, css = ".cr-side-title a") |>
  html_attr(name = "href")

# extract dates and authors as separate vectors
dates <- str_split_i(string = dates_authors, pattern = "·", i = 1) |>
  mdy()

authors <- str_split_i(string = dates_authors, pattern = "·", i = 2) |>
  # remove leading and trailing whitespace
  str_trim()

# create a tibble with this data
review <- tibble(
  title = titles,
  author = authors,
  date = dates,
  topic = topics,
  url = post_urls
)

# save to disk
write_csv(x = review, file = "data/cornell-review.csv")
sessioninfo::session_info()
─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.6.1 (2026-06-24)
 os       macOS Golden Gate 27.0
 system   aarch64, darwin23
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  en_US.UTF-8
 ctype    en_US.UTF-8
 tz       America/New_York
 date     2026-09-30
 pandoc   3.10 @ /Applications/Positron.app/Contents/Resources/app/quarto/bin/tools/aarch64/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.10.18 @ /Applications/quarto/bin/quarto

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 ! package      * version date (UTC) lib source
 P chromote       0.5.1   2025-04-24 [?] RSPM
 P cli            3.6.6   2026-04-09 [?] RSPM
 P digest         0.6.39  2025-11-19 [?] RSPM
 P dplyr        * 1.2.1   2026-04-03 [?] RSPM
 P evaluate       1.0.5   2025-08-27 [?] RSPM
 P farver         2.1.2   2024-05-13 [?] RSPM
 P fastmap        1.2.0   2024-05-15 [?] RSPM
 P forcats      * 1.0.1   2025-09-25 [?] RSPM
 P generics       0.1.4   2025-05-09 [?] RSPM
 P ggplot2      * 4.0.3   2026-04-22 [?] RSPM
 P glue           1.8.1   2026-04-17 [?] RSPM
 P gtable         0.3.6   2024-10-25 [?] RSPM
 P here           1.0.2   2025-09-15 [?] RSPM
 P hms            1.1.4   2025-10-17 [?] RSPM
 P htmltools      0.5.9   2025-12-04 [?] RSPM
 P htmlwidgets    1.6.4   2023-12-06 [?] RSPM
 P httr           1.4.8   2026-02-13 [?] RSPM
 P jsonlite       2.0.0   2025-03-27 [?] RSPM
 P knitr          1.51    2025-12-20 [?] RSPM
 P later          1.4.8   2026-03-05 [?] RSPM
 P lifecycle      1.0.5   2026-01-08 [?] RSPM
 P lubridate    * 1.9.5   2026-02-04 [?] RSPM
 P magrittr       2.0.5   2026-04-04 [?] RSPM
 P otel           0.2.0   2025-08-29 [?] RSPM
 P pillar         1.11.1  2025-09-17 [?] RSPM
 P pkgconfig      2.0.3   2019-09-22 [?] RSPM
 P processx       3.9.0   2026-04-22 [?] RSPM
 P promises       1.5.0   2025-11-01 [?] RSPM
 P purrr        * 1.2.2   2026-04-10 [?] RSPM
 P R6             2.6.1   2025-02-15 [?] RSPM
 P RColorBrewer   1.1-3   2022-04-03 [?] RSPM
 P Rcpp           1.1.2   2026-07-05 [?] RSPM
 P readr        * 2.2.0   2026-02-19 [?] RSPM
   renv           1.2.2   2026-04-16 [1] RSPM (R 4.6.1)
 P rlang          1.3.0   2026-07-05 [?] RSPM
 P rmarkdown      2.31    2026-03-26 [?] RSPM
 P robotstxt    * 0.7.15  2024-08-29 [?] RSPM
 P rprojroot      2.1.1   2025-08-26 [?] RSPM
 P rvest        * 1.0.5   2025-08-29 [?] RSPM
 P S7             0.2.2   2026-04-22 [?] RSPM
 P scales         1.4.0   2025-04-24 [?] RSPM
 P sessioninfo    1.2.4   2026-06-04 [?] RSPM
 P stringi        1.8.9   2026-08-04 [?] RSPM
 P stringr      * 1.6.0   2025-11-04 [?] RSPM
 P tibble       * 3.3.1   2026-01-11 [?] RSPM
 P tidyr        * 1.3.2   2025-12-19 [?] RSPM
 P tidyselect     1.2.1   2024-03-11 [?] RSPM
 P tidyverse    * 2.0.0   2023-02-22 [?] RSPM
 P timechange     0.4.0   2026-01-29 [?] RSPM
 P tzdb           0.5.0   2025-03-15 [?] RSPM
 P vctrs          0.7.3   2026-04-11 [?] RSPM
 P websocket      1.4.4   2025-04-10 [?] RSPM
 P withr          3.0.3   2026-06-19 [?] RSPM
 P xfun           0.60    2026-07-09 [?] RSPM
 P xml2           1.6.0   2026-06-22 [?] RSPM
 P yaml           2.3.12  2025-12-10 [?] RSPM

 [1] /Users/bcs88/Projects/info-5001/course-site/renv/library/macos/R-4.6/aarch64-apple-darwin23
 [2] /Users/bcs88/Library/Caches/org.R-project.R/R/renv/sandbox/macos/R-4.6/aarch64-apple-darwin23/46003b10

 * ── Packages attached to the search path.
 P ── Loaded and on-disk path mismatch.

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