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Course

Web Scraping in R

Intermediate

4.8+

Updated 05/2025

Learn how to efficiently collect and download data from any website using R.

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RData Preparation4 hours13 videos45 Exercises3,600 XP13,610Statement of Accomplishment

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Course Description

Have you ever come across a website that displays a lot of data such as statistics, product reviews, or prices in a format that’s not data analysis-ready? Often, authorities and other data providers publish their data in neatly formatted tables. However, not all of these sites include a download button, but don’t despair. In this course, you’ll learn how to efficiently collect and download data from any website using R. You'll learn how to automate the scraping and parsing of Wikipedia using the rvest and httr packages. Through hands-on exercises, you’ll also expand your understanding of HTML and CSS, the building blocks of web pages, as you make your data harvesting workflows less error-prone and more efficient.

Prerequisites

Intermediate R Introduction to the Tidyverse

1

Introduction to HTML and Web Scraping

Introduction to HTML

Read in HTML

Beware of syntax errors!

Navigating HTML

Select all children of a list

Parse hyperlinks into a data frame

Scrape your first table

The right order of table elements

Turn a table into a data frame with html_table()

2

Navigation and Selection with CSS

Introduction to CSS

Select multiple HTML types

Order CSS selectors by the number of results

CSS classes and IDs

Identify the correct selector types

Leverage the uniqueness of IDs

Select the last child with a pseudo-class

CSS combinators

Select direct descendants with the child combinator

How many elements get returned?

Simply the best!

Not every sibling is the same

3

Advanced Selection with XPATH

Introduction to XPATH

Find the correct CSS equivalent

Select by class and ID with XPATH

Use predicates to select nodes based on their children

XPATH functions and advanced predicates

Find a more elegant XPATH alternative

Get to know the position() function

Extract nodes based on the number of their children

The XPATH text() function

The shortcomings of html_table() with badly structured tables

Select directly from a parent element with XPATH's text()

Combine extracted data into a data frame

Scrape an element based on its text

4

Scraping Best Practices

The nature of HTTP requests

Which of these statements about HTTP is false?

Do it the httr way

Houston, we got a 404!

Telling who you are with custom user agents

Check out your user agent

Add a custom user agent

How to be gentle and slow down your requests

Custom arguments for throttled functions

Apply throttling to a multi-page crawler

Recap: Web Scraping in R

Web Scraping in R

Course
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Included withPremium or Teams

Don’t just take our word for it

*4.8

from 27 reviews

85%

15%

0%

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0%

Highest to Lowest
Lowest to Highest
Most recent
Top reviews

Md Aminul Islam

2 days

MUHAMMAD ALI

3 days

Amazing

Mushtaq

3 days

Mushtaq's Review of "Web Scraping in R" Course

review <- "This course is an excellent resource for learning web scraping with R. The lessons on rvest and httr were particularly helpful in understanding how to extract data from websites efficiently. The hands-on exercises, including working with XPATH and applying throttling techniques, made the learning experience practical and engaging. I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in scraping and automating data extraction with R. Whether you're new to R or looking to enhance your scraping skills, this course provides the tools and techniques you need."print(review)

Shoaib Ul

4 days

Zia Zuhaib

7 days

David

2 days

Md Aminul Islam

"Amazing"

MUHAMMAD ALI

Shoaib Ul

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