makeurl: Make URL string

In kuhnrl30/LabCorp: Scrape the LabCorp.com website for a list of locations

Description

Creates a URL strings which can be used to scrape LabCorp's website for location data based on a search query. This function only forms the URL string which must be passed to another funtion to retrieve the data.

Usage

makeurl(params = list(), referer)

Arguments

params	List of query parameters passed on to querystring where they are parsed into key value pairs and then formated for the URL string.
referer	Character string. See the vignette for details.

Value

character string

Referer

The referer is built into the url string as a way to identify where the request was initiated from. The referer also allows the server to validate a request was properly initiated. Without a valid referer value, the server may not return any results from the query. In the case of webscraping, this acts as a barrier to programattically extracting the location data from the website. The referer value changes with each session so a current value should be supplied each time a URL string is built. This is not to say a new referer needs to be provided for each URL string. Multiple queries can be run in each session.

kuhnrl30/LabCorp documentation built on May 20, 2019, 7:05 p.m.