Scraping a website with 5 lines of R code

In what is rapidly becoming a series — cool things you can do with R in a tweet — Julia Silge demonstrates scraping the list of members of the US house of representatives on Wikipedia in just 5 R statements:

library(rvest)
library(tidyverse)

h <- read_html("https://t.co/gloY1eErBn")

reps <- h %>%
html_node("#mw-content-text > div > table:nth-child(18)") %>%
html_table()

reps <- reps[,c(1:2,4:9)] %>%
as_tibble() pic.twitter.com/25ANm7BHkj

— Julia Silge (@juliasilge) January 12, 2018

Since Twitter munges the URL in the third line when you cut-and-paste, here's a plain-text version of Julia's code:

library(rvest)
library(tidyverse)

h <- read_html("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_members_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives")

reps <- h %>%
 html_node("#mw-content-text > div > table:nth-child(18)") %>%
 html_table()

reps <- reps[,c(1:2,4:9)] %>% as_tibble()

And sure enough, here's what the reps object looks like in the RStudio viewer:

As Julia notes it's not perfect, but you're still 95% of the way there to gathering data from a page intended for human rather than computer consumption. Impressive!

Comments

[liotims]

Instead of using the 18th child of table in the first div of "#mw-content-text" div you can directly use the id of the table using xpath

html_node(xpath = '//*[@id="votingmembers"]') %>%

[David Smith]

That's really useful - thanks @liotims!

[Sean Raleigh]

Or even without the pain of xpath:

html_node("#votingmembers")