AE 08: Scraping articles from the Cornell Review
Suggested answers
Application exercise
Answers
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)
# 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 = "#main .read-title a") |>
html_text2()
authors <- html_elements(x = page, css = "#main .byline a") |>
html_text2()
article_dates <- html_elements(x = page, css = "#main .posts-date") |>
html_text2()
topics <- html_elements(x = page, css = "#main .cat-links") |>
html_text2()
abstracts <- html_elements(x = page, css = ".post-description") |>
html_text2()
post_urls <- html_elements(x = page, css = ".aft-readmore") |>
html_attr(name = "href")
# create a tibble with this data
review_raw <- tibble(
title = titles,
author = authors,
date = article_dates,
topic = topics,
description = abstracts,
url = post_urls
)
# clean up the data
review <- review_raw |>
mutate(
date = mdy(date),
description = str_remove(string = description, pattern = "\nRead More")
)
# save to disk
write_csv(x = review, file = "data/cornell-review.csv")
Session information
sessioninfo::session_info()
─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
setting value
version R version 4.4.1 (2024-06-14)
os macOS Sonoma 14.6.1
system aarch64, darwin20
ui X11
language (EN)
collate en_US.UTF-8
ctype en_US.UTF-8
tz America/New_York
date 2024-10-08
pandoc 3.4 @ /usr/local/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
! package * version date (UTC) lib source
cli 3.6.3 2024-06-21 [1] RSPM (R 4.4.0)
P colorspace 2.1-0 2023-01-23 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P digest 0.6.35 2024-03-11 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P dplyr * 1.1.4 2023-11-17 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P evaluate 0.24.0 2024-06-10 [?] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
P fansi 1.0.6 2023-12-08 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P fastmap 1.2.0 2024-05-15 [?] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
P forcats * 1.0.0 2023-01-29 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P generics 0.1.3 2022-07-05 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P ggplot2 * 3.5.1 2024-04-23 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P glue 1.7.0 2024-01-09 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P gtable 0.3.5 2024-04-22 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P here 1.0.1 2020-12-13 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P hms 1.1.3 2023-03-21 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P htmltools 0.5.8.1 2024-04-04 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P htmlwidgets 1.6.4 2023-12-06 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P httr 1.4.7 2023-08-15 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P jsonlite 1.8.8 2023-12-04 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P knitr 1.47 2024-05-29 [?] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
P lifecycle 1.0.4 2023-11-07 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P lubridate * 1.9.3 2023-09-27 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P magrittr 2.0.3 2022-03-30 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P munsell 0.5.1 2024-04-01 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P pillar 1.9.0 2023-03-22 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P pkgconfig 2.0.3 2019-09-22 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P purrr * 1.0.2 2023-08-10 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P R6 2.5.1 2021-08-19 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P readr * 2.1.5 2024-01-10 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
renv 1.0.7 2024-04-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
P rlang 1.1.4 2024-06-04 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.3)
P rmarkdown 2.27 2024-05-17 [?] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
P robotstxt * 0.7.13 2020-09-03 [?] RSPM
P rprojroot 2.0.4 2023-11-05 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P rvest * 1.0.4 2024-02-12 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P scales 1.3.0.9000 2024-05-07 [?] Github (r-lib/scales@c0f79d3)
P sessioninfo 1.2.2 2021-12-06 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P stringi 1.8.4 2024-05-06 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P stringr * 1.5.1 2023-11-14 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P tibble * 3.2.1 2023-03-20 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P tidyr * 1.3.1 2024-01-24 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P tidyselect 1.2.1 2024-03-11 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P tidyverse * 2.0.0 2023-02-22 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P timechange 0.3.0 2024-01-18 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P tzdb 0.4.0 2023-05-12 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
P utf8 1.2.4 2023-10-22 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P vctrs 0.6.5 2023-12-01 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
withr 3.0.1 2024-07-31 [1] RSPM (R 4.4.0)
P xfun 0.45 2024-06-16 [?] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
P xml2 1.3.6 2023-12-04 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
P yaml 2.3.8 2023-12-11 [?] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
[1] /Users/soltoffbc/Projects/info-5001/course-site/renv/library/macos/R-4.4/aarch64-apple-darwin20
[2] /Users/soltoffbc/Library/Caches/org.R-project.R/R/renv/sandbox/macos/R-4.4/aarch64-apple-darwin20/f7156815
P ── Loaded and on-disk path mismatch.
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