library(tidyverse)
library(rvest)
library(lubridate)
library(robotstxt)AE 09: 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.
- lubridate: For formatting date variables.
- 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(lubridate)
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 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
os macOS Ventura 13.5.2
system aarch64, darwin20
ui X11
language (EN)
collate en_US.UTF-8
ctype en_US.UTF-8
tz America/New_York
date 2023-10-04
pandoc 3.1.1 @ /Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/Resources/app/quarto/bin/tools/ (via rmarkdown)
─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
package * version date (UTC) lib source
cli 3.6.1 2023-03-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
colorspace 2.1-0 2023-01-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
digest 0.6.31 2022-12-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
dplyr * 1.1.2 2023-04-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
evaluate 0.21 2023-05-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
fansi 1.0.4 2023-01-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
fastmap 1.1.1 2023-02-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
forcats * 1.0.0 2023-01-29 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
generics 0.1.3 2022-07-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
ggplot2 * 3.4.2 2023-04-03 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
glue 1.6.2 2022-02-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
gtable 0.3.3 2023-03-21 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
here 1.0.1 2020-12-13 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
hms 1.1.3 2023-03-21 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
htmltools 0.5.5 2023-03-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
htmlwidgets 1.6.2 2023-03-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
httr 1.4.6 2023-05-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
jsonlite 1.8.5 2023-06-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
knitr 1.43 2023-05-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
lifecycle 1.0.3 2022-10-07 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
lubridate * 1.9.2 2023-02-10 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
magrittr 2.0.3 2022-03-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
munsell 0.5.0 2018-06-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
pillar 1.9.0 2023-03-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
pkgconfig 2.0.3 2019-09-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
purrr * 1.0.1 2023-01-10 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
R6 2.5.1 2021-08-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
readr * 2.1.4 2023-02-10 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
rlang 1.1.1 2023-04-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
rmarkdown 2.22 2023-06-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
robotstxt * 0.7.13 2020-09-03 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
rprojroot 2.0.3 2022-04-02 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
rstudioapi 0.14 2022-08-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
rvest * 1.0.3 2022-08-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
scales 1.2.1 2022-08-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
sessioninfo 1.2.2 2021-12-06 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
stringi 1.7.12 2023-01-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
stringr * 1.5.0 2022-12-02 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
tibble * 3.2.1 2023-03-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
tidyr * 1.3.0 2023-01-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
tidyselect 1.2.0 2022-10-10 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
tidyverse * 2.0.0 2023-02-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
timechange 0.2.0 2023-01-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
tzdb 0.4.0 2023-05-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
utf8 1.2.3 2023-01-31 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
vctrs 0.6.3 2023-06-14 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
withr 2.5.0 2022-03-03 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
xfun 0.39 2023-04-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
xml2 1.3.4 2023-04-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
yaml 2.3.7 2023-01-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
[1] /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/library
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