R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide. Techniques and tools to crawl and scrape data from websites

Web scraping is a technique to extract data from websites. It simulates the behavior of a website user to turn the website itself into a web service to retrieve or introduce new data.

This book gives you all you need to get started with scraping web pages using R programming.You will learn about the rules of RegEx and Xpath, key components for scraping website data. We will show you web scraping techniques, methodologies, and frameworks.

• With this book's guidance, you will become comfortable with the tools to write and test RegEx and XPath rules.
• We will focus on examples of dynamic websites for scraping data and how to implement the techniques learned.
• You will learn how to collect URLs and then create XPath rules for your first web scraping script using rvest library.
• From the data you collect, you will be able to calculate the statistics and create R plots to visualize them.
• Finally, you will discover how to use Selenium drivers with R for more sophisticated scraping.
• You will create AWS instances and use R to connect a PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS.
• By the end of the book, you will be sufficiently confident to create end-to-end web scraping systems using R.