getTextValuesFromPage: Web Scraper Function

In lacoperon/MDScraperTools: R Package for Molecular Dynamics-related scraping and related big data analysis

Description

This function allows you to scrape the text values within multiple elements, specified by the xpath 'path', on a particular website referenced by 'url'. This serves as a helper function to scrape sites relevant to Bioinformatics-based purposes, and as this package is developed I will add more higher-level functions that scrape from commonly used sites. But in the meantime (and I'm sure for a long time to come), this will be handy. If you are trying to scrape one particular element, see 'getTextValueFromPage'.

Usage

getTextValuesFromPage(url, path)

Arguments

url	The url corresponding to the website in question
path	The xpath associated with the elements we want to grab the text inside

Examples

# This gets the paper authors associated with a structure on RCSB
url <- "http://www.rcsb.org/structure/6B4V"
author_path <- '//*[@id="header_deposition-authors"]'
getAuthorNames <- partial(getTextValueFromPage, path=author_path)
cand_structs$Authors <- substr(getAuthorNames(url), 27, 200)

lacoperon/MDScraperTools documentation built on May 28, 2019, 12:59 p.m.