Get startedGet started for free

Select direct descendants with the child combinator

By now, you surely know how to select elements by type, class, or ID. However, there are cases where these selectors won't work, for example, if you only want to extract direct descendants of the top ul element. For that, you will use the child combinator (>) introduced in the video.

Here, your goal is to scrape a list (contained in the languages_html document) of all mentioned computer languages, but without the accompanying information in the sub-bullets:

  <ul id = 'languages'>
    <li>SQL</li>
    <ul>    
      <li>Databases</li>
      <li>Query Language</li>
    </ul>
    <li>R</li>
    <ul>
      <li>Collection</li>
      <li>Analysis</li>
      <li>Visualization</li>
    </ul>
    <li>Python</li>
  </ul>

This exercise is part of the course

Web Scraping in R

View Course

Hands-on interactive exercise

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

# Extract the text of all list elements
languages_html %>% 
	___ %>% 
	___
Edit and Run Code