Do it the httr way

Here's some rvest code that I used to find out the elevation of a beautiful place where I recently spent my vacation.

# Get the HTML document from Wikipedia
wikipedia_page <- read_html('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varigotti')
# Parse the document and extract the elevation from it
wikipedia_page %>% 
  html_elements('table tr:nth-child(9) > td') %>% 
  html_text()

As you have learned in the video, read_html() actually issues an HTTP GET request if provided with a URL, like in this case.

The goal of this exercise is to replicate the same query without read_html(), but with httr methods instead.

Note: Usually rvest does the job, but if you want to customize requests like you'll be shown later in this chapter, you'll need to know the httr way.

For a little repetition, you'll also translate the CSS selector used in html_elements() into an XPATH query.

Use only httr functions to replicate the behavior of read_html(), including getting the response from Wikipedia and parsing the response object into an HTML document.
Check the resulting HTTP status code with the appropriate httr function.

Exercise

Do it the httr way

Instructions 1/2