January 2015
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
14h 15m
English
book
Automated Data Collection with R: A Practical Guide to Web Scraping and Text Mining
by Simon Munzert, Christian Rubba, Peter Meissner, Dominic Nyhuis
Content preview from Automated Data Collection with R: A Practical Guide to Web Scraping and Text Mining
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
3 XML and JSON
XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, is one of the most popular formats for exchanging data over the Web. But it is more than that. It is ubiquitous in our daily life. As Harold and Means (2004, xiii) note:
XML has become the syntax of choice for newly designed document formats across almost all computer applications. It's used on Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and many other computer platforms. Mainframes on Wall Street trade stocks with one another by exchanging XML documents. Children playing games on their home PCs save their documents in XML. Sports fans receive real-time game scores on their cell phones in XML. XML is simply the most robust, reliable, and flexible document syntax ever invented.
XML looks familiar to someone with basic knowledge about HTML, as it shares the same features of a markup language. Nevertheless, HTML and XML both serve their own specific purposes. While HTML is used to shape the display of information, the main purpose of XML is to store data. Therefore, the content of an XML document does not get much nicer when it is opened with a browser—XML is data wrapped in user-defined tags. The user-defined tags make XML much more flexible for storing data than HTML. The main goal of this chapter is not to turn you into an XML coding expert, but to get you used to the key components of XML documents.
We start with a look at a running XML example (Section 3.1) and continue with an inspection of the XML syntax (Section 3.2). There are several ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.