Since web scraping and API tutorials are deemed to be obsolete once they
changes it’s structure or go down indefinately, scrapex saves specific
web paths of certain websites to make scraping examples reproducibly in
the long term. Moreover, it scrapex contains local copies of custom
APIs for educational purposes using the plumber package. To make the
package as lightweight as possible, for the local copies of websites,
some images/figures/maps have been excluded. Aside from that, most
examples should contain the rough skeleton of the original website.
scrapex will probably never see the light of CRAN since it is deemed
to grow in size if new examples come along, so you need to install the
development version from GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("cimentadaj/scrapex")scrapex contains websites which have been saved locally for users to
use as examples. Each example has only one function which returns the
local links to the html websites. For example, for the spanish schools
examples (see ?spanish_schools_ex for documentation on the example),
we can obtain the links with spanish_schools_ex():
library(scrapex)
library(xml2)
school_websites <- spanish_schools_ex()
school_websites
#> [1] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_15012626.html"
#> [2] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_15013308.html"
#> [3] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_2009122.html"
#> [4] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_2009158.html"
#> [5] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_28043727.html"
#> [6] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_28060661.html"
#> [7] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_28061262.html"
#> [8] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_28061663.html"
#> [9] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_28061675.html"
#> [10] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_28062606.html"
#> [11] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_28063003.html"
#> [12] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_30018357.html"
#> [13] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_3006839.html"
#> [14] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_37013560.html"
#> [15] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_37013638.html"
#> [16] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_37013663.html"
#> [17] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_37013687.html"
#> [18] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_37013705.html"
#> [19] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_43007440.html"
#> [20] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_43007464.html"
#> [21] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_43007491.html"
#> [22] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_43007555.html"
#> [23] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_43007579.html"
#> [24] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_8051276.html"
#> [25] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_8052190.html"
#> [26] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_8067961.html"
#> [27] "/tmp/Rtmph3vN2y/temp_libpath524336b0c86d6/scrapex/extdata/spanish_schools_ex/school_8067971.html"To browse the actual website of one of these links, use prep_browser
with openURL:
browseURL(prep_browser(school_websites)[1])To actually scrape information from these websites, they work as
expected with read_html.
# You can read them with `read_html`
read_html(school_websites[1])
#> {html_document}
#> <html lang="es-es">
#> [1] <head>\n<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8 ...
#> [2] <body>\r\n \r\n <a href="#contenidoPpal" class="sr-only">Saltar a c ...All APIs in scrapex export a function that launches the API. These
functions start with api_*. For example, loading the local copy of the
API for the public bicycle system of Barcelona can be done like this:
library(scrapex)
library(httr2)
#>
#> Attaching package: 'httr2'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:xml2':
#>
#> url_parse
bicing <- api_bicing()
#> [1] "Visit your REST API at https://localhost:3330"
#> [1] "Documentation is at https://localhost:3330/__docs__/"You’ll see that the API returns a link to the documentation of the API as well as to the main URL of the API. Users can then make requests just as if this was a real API. For example:
rt_bicing <- paste0(bicing$api_web, "/api/v1/real_time_bicycles")
resp_output <-
rt_bicing %>%
request() %>%
req_perform() %>%
resp_body_json() %>%
lapply(data.frame) %>%
do.call(rbind, .)
resp_output
#> type latitude longitude streetName streetNumber slots
#> 1 BIKE 41.3980 2.1800 Gran Via Corts Catalanes 760 29
#> 2 BIKE 41.3955 2.1771 Roger de Flor/ Gran Vía 126 27
#> 3 BIKE 41.3941 2.1813 Nàpols 82 27
#> 4 BIKE 41.3935 2.1816 Ribes 13 20
#> 5 BIKE 41.3911 2.1802 Pg Lluís Companys 11 39
#> 6 BIKE 41.3913 2.1806 Pg Lluís Companys 18 39
#> 7 BIKE 41.3889 2.1833 Pg Lluís Companys 1 23
#> 8 BIKE 41.3891 2.1836 Pg Lluís Companys 2 26
#> 9 BIKE 41.3845 2.1849 Marquès de l'Argentera 13 26
#> 10 BIKE 41.3817 2.1939 Passeig Marítim 19 21
#> 11 BIKE 41.3845 2.1957 Pg Marítim Barceloneta 23 29
#> 12 BIKE 41.3869 2.1958 Avinguda Litoral 16 3
#> 13 BIKE 41.3847 2.1850 Avinguda del Marques Argentera 15 26
#> 14 BIKE 41.3948 2.1712 Girona 68 18
#> 15 BIKE 41.3983 2.1867 Av. Meridiana 47 21
#> 16 BIKE 41.3982 2.1867 Av. Meridiana 47 21
#> 17 BIKE 41.4061 2.1742 Rosselló 453 26
#> 18 BIKE 41.4033 2.1707 Rosselló 354 28
#> 19 BIKE 41.4102 2.1758 Cartagena 308 20
#> 20 BIKE 41.4109 2.1740 Sant Antoni Maria Claret 214 2
#> current_time in_use
#> 1 2022-12-23 17:43:33 29
#> 2 2022-12-23 17:43:33 12
#> 3 2022-12-23 17:43:33 13
#> 4 2022-12-23 17:43:33 17
#> 5 2022-12-23 17:43:33 14
#> 6 2022-12-23 17:43:33 8
#> 7 2022-12-23 17:43:33 1
#> 8 2022-12-23 17:43:33 26
#> 9 2022-12-23 17:43:33 26
#> 10 2022-12-23 17:43:33 7
#> 11 2022-12-23 17:43:33 21
#> 12 2022-12-23 17:43:33 3
#> 13 2022-12-23 17:43:33 1
#> 14 2022-12-23 17:43:33 15
#> 15 2022-12-23 17:43:33 14
#> 16 2022-12-23 17:43:33 3
#> 17 2022-12-23 17:43:33 20
#> 18 2022-12-23 17:43:33 21
#> 19 2022-12-23 17:43:33 1
#> 20 2022-12-23 17:43:33 2This package is a work in progress and welcomes more examples from different backgrounds. If you want to contribute to the package you can send a pull request following these guidelines:
-
One function that clearly states the substantive theme of your example (for example,
spanish_schools_exfor web scraping orapi_*for an API). This function should return the full local path of the html for each single page of your example (not the full local path to the complete website) for web scraping and a list with thecallrprocess and the API website for an API. -
For webscraping, all of your local example files should be in a folder located in
inst/extdatawith the same name as the main function. Within this folder, there should be only one.Rfile which shows how the download was done. We aim to keep the package as lightweight as possible so, for example, it would be important to delete large files and complicated (long) paths. Keep in mind two things: nested directories with very long names (standard when saving a website) and complicated file names (containing dots, question marks, equal signs, etc…) will throw errors when runningdevtools::check(). For thespanish_schools_exI downloaded each path to the websites, identified the relevant html, renamed it to something shorter and valid, moved only that file to thespanish_schools_exfolder and deleted the website’s complete directory structure. The result is only one html file for each path of the website. -
For APIs, internal functions should go within one single
api_*.Rfile. The API itself should be located in/inst/plumber/.
For webscraping, I encourage anyone looking to do a PR to look at the
one for spanish_schools_ex which is called download_school.R (note
that this is tricky because downloading a path of a website many times
results in downloading the complete website. Look at the example in
download_school.R to only download single paths). For the API example,
I encourage users to look at the file R/api_coveragedb.R and
inst/plumber/api_coveragedb/.
- Each main function should have an accompanied test file that has
at least the same tests as
spanish_schools_ex(). Similarly for APIs forapi_coveragedb().
All suggestions are very welcome if you feel this is not the most optimal storage strategy! Open an issue request and we’ll discuss it.