🗓️ Week 01 – Day 04: Web Scraping

Inspecting and scraping data from the Web

Author

Published

12 July 2023

An introduction to the tools and techniques for scraping data from the web.

A closer look at the HTML DOM
Inspecting complex websites
How to locate the data we want from website sources
Basics of XPath
Web scraping in R

👨‍🏫 Lecture Material

For today’s lecture, we won’t be using slides. Instead, you can download the lecture material as a Quarto Markdown file by clicking the button below.

Important

If your RStudio installation didn’t include Quarto by default, you have a couple of options.

First, you can try upgrading both R and RStudio to the latest versions. Additionally, you can install Quarto separately by following the instructions here.

Alternatively, rename the file from .qmd to the .Rmd extension. It should work without any problems (I haven’t used any Quarto-specific features in the file).

🎥 Looking for lecture recordings? You can only find those on Moodle.

📖 Recommended readings & Revision

What is the DOM? (10 min. skim)
What is XPath? & XPath Tutorial