R webscraping tutorial

A quick introduction to webscraping in R using {rvest} with a couple of use cases relevant for researchers.

R scripts

• scrape-wiki.R shows an example of scraping multiple tables from a website (in this case Wikipedia) and joining them together based on a column with common values.
• scrape-carjam.R shows an example of scraping tables from multiple webpages using an offset in the URL.
• scrape-imdb.R shows an example of scraping a single table weekly, and using a GitHub action to automate this process (in .github/workflows/update.yml), in order to build a dataset to show changes over time.

Data scraped from the IMDB example is saved in /data, and analyse.R can be used to analyse and plot the data to show changes over time.

Other files

• slides.qmd is a Quarto markdown document containing code used to create slides in the /docs directory, based ona couple of options in _quarto.yml, which are then published here via GitHub pages.
• r-scraping-tutorial.Rproj is an RStudio project file and .gitignore is created by RStudio to exclude certain files from being tracked by version control.
• .nojekyll tells GitHub pages not to do any further processing to the 'website' used to host the slides.

Licence

All code in this repository is licensed under the MIT license.