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.
16 Gathering data on mobile phones
In this case study, we gather data on pricing, costumer rating, and sales ranks of a broad range of mobile phones sold on amazon.com, wondering about the price segments covered by leading producers of mobile phones. Amazon sells a broad range of products, allowing us to get comprehensive summary of the products from each of the big mobile phone producers.
The case study makes use of the packages RCurl, XML, and stringr and it features search page manipulation, link extraction, and page downloads using the RCurl curl handle. After reading the case study, you should be able to search information in source code and to apply XPath in real-life problems. Furthermore, within this case study a SQLite database is created to store data in a consistent way and make it reusable for the next case study.
16.1 Page exploration
16.1.1 Searching mobile phones of a specific brand
Amazon sells all kinds of products. Our first task is therefore to restrict the product search to certain categories and specific producers. Furthermore, we have to find a way to exclude accessories or used phones.
Let us have a look at the Amazon website: www.amazon.com. Check out the search bar at the top of the page—see also Figure 16.1. In addition to typing in search keywords, we can select the department in which we want to search. Do the following:
- Type Apple into the search bar and press enter.
- Select Cell Phones & Accessories from the search ...
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.