Houston, we got a 404!

As you've seen in the video, a fundamental part of the HTTP system are status codes: They tell you if everything is okay or if there is a problem with your request.

It is good practice to always check the status code of a response before you start working with the downloaded page. For this, you can use the status_code() function from the httr() package. It takes as an argument a response object that results from a request method.

Now let's assume you're trying to scrape the same page as before, but somehow you got the URL wrong (Varigott instead of Varigotti).