R/sbscrape_facebook.R

In sbscrapeR: Social Blade Scraper

#'Scrape Facebook statistics from socialblade.com
#'
#'@param url will only work with https://socialblade.com/facebook/page/... links
#'
#'@keywords facebook
#'@concept socialblade
#'@export
#'@examples
#'sbscrape_facebook("https://socialblade.com/facebook/page/facebook")


sbscrape_facebook<-function(url){
  # require(rvest,quietly = TRUE)
  # require(lubridate,quietly=TRUE)

  tryCatch(
    {
      pipeit<-function(url,code){
        read_html(url)%>%html_nodes(code)%>%html_text()
      }

      lk<-pipeit(url,
                 "#socialblade-user-content div div div:nth-child(2) div:nth-child(2)")
      lk<-trimws(lk[-c(1:2)])

      tk<-pipeit(url,
                 "#socialblade-user-content div div div:nth-child(3) div:nth-child(2)")
      dates<-c()
      for(i in 1:14){
        dates[i]<-Sys.Date()-i+1
      }
      dates<-rev(as_date(dates))
      lk<-as.numeric(sapply(as.character(lk),
                            function(x) gsub(",","",x)))
      tk<-as.numeric(sapply(as.character(tk),
                            function(x) gsub(",","",x)))

      data.frame(Date=dates,"Likes"=lk,"Talking About"=tk)
    },
    error=function(error_message){
      message("Error in sbscrape_facebook(): Please enter valid url. ")
      message('sbscrape_facebook will only work with "https://socialblade.com/facebook/page/..." links')
    })
}