inst/shiny-examples/03_craigslist-lost-and-found/README.md

In googlesheets: Manage Google Spreadsheets from R

title: "Craigslist Lost and Found" output: html_document

Description

This app is currently deployed here.

Craigslist Lost and Found is a simple app that reads from a Google Sheet that is "published to the web" and can be found here. This Google Sheet uses the built-in function IMPORTXML to scrape Craigslist's Lost and Found listing. You can view the posts listed for any one day and also see the overall number and type of posts.

Setting up the Google Sheet

1. Find the URL for the web page that you want to collect data from.
2. Our example uses http://vancouver.craigslist.ca/search/laf.
3. Get the XPath expression to scrape the elements you want from the page.
4. Our example uses //span[@class='pl'].
5. Enter the formula =IMPORTXML(URL, XPATH_QUERY) in a cell. Make sure there is a good amount of blank cells to the right or else the data may not fit and an error is thrown. If all goes well, a table of data populates to the right of the formula cell.

Resources on getting the XPath expression: It is useful to see the HTML of the page (eg. in Chrome you can right click -> Inspect Element).

• Web Scraping with Google Sheets and XPath
• Feeding Google Spreadsheets

googlesheets documentation built on May 2, 2019, 1:57 p.m.