Leverage the uniqueness of IDs

As you know, IDs should be unique across a web page. If you can make sure this is the case, it can reduce the complexity of your scraping selectors drastically.

Here's the structure of an HTML page you might encounter in the wild:

<html>
  <body>
    <div id = 'first'>
      <h1 class = 'big'>Joe Biden</h1>
      <p class = 'first blue'>Democrat</p>
      <p class = 'second blue'>Male</p>
    </div>
    <div id = 'second'>...</div>
    <div id = 'third'>
      <h1 class = 'big'>Donald Trump</h1>
      <p class = 'first red'>Republican</p>
      <p class = 'second red'>Male</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

It has been read in for you with read_html() and is available through structured_html.

This exercise is part of the course

Web Scraping in R

View Course

Exercise instructions

Using html_elements(), find the shortest possible selector to select the first div in structured_html.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Select the first div
structured_html %>%
  ___

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