Modern R Programming Cookbook

How to do it…

The HTML file is a tree-like structure. It represents the data using various internal nodes. Each node is represented by tag pair, such as <p>…</p>. The steps are as follows:

1. Create an R object containing the character string of the website address.
2. Load the XML library into your R session.
3. Parse the link into the htmlTreeParse() function, and make sure you have mentioned useInternalNodes=TRUE.
4. To get an exact plain text value from the HTML tree, you can use the xpathSApply() function with HTML tag pairs.

The R code corresponding to the preceding steps is as follows:

        library(XML)        sourceURL <-            "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_with_Big_Data_in_R"        link2web <- url(sourceURL)        htmlText <- readLines(link2web) close(link2web) ...