Modern R Programming Cookbook

How to do it…

To read an unstructured text data from a web page using the most naïve R approach, perform the following steps:

1. Create a character object containing the web page address in the form of an URL.
2. Create a connection with the link using the url() function from the base library.
3. Read the source code of the web page line by line. Then, the resultant object will contain all the source code of the web page in the form of a character vector. The length of the vector will be equal to the number of lines into the source code of the HTML web page:

        # Creating an object containing the link to the webpage        sourceURL <-           "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_with_Big_Data_in_R" # Creating an active connection between R session and webpage ...