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.

Deze oefening maakt deel uit van de cursus

Web Scraping in R

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Oefeninstructies

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

Praktische interactieve oefening

Probeer deze oefening eens door deze voorbeeldcode in te vullen.

# Select the first div
structured_html %>%
  ___

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