README.md

In noamross/quickscraper: A wrapper for the quickscrape web-scraping framework

quickscraper

An R wrapper for the quickscrape web scraping tool.

Installation

You need node.js 0.8 or later installed to run quickscraper. You can get it here.

In R, run:

if(!require(devtools)) install.packge("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("noamross/quickscraper")

When first loaded, quickscraper will ask to install its node module dependencies. These are not bundled with the package because they contain system-specific binaries which would not be allowed on CRAN, but by using the node package manager after the R package install, the correct ones can be selected and installed.

The node-wrapping and dependency-checking components of this package (In R/node.r) will eventually be extracted into a separate package of utilties for wrapping arbitrary node modules.

Usage

Usage is currently very basic, as the quickscrape API is still evolving.

The function scrape() scrapes information from a url or a set or URLs, saving the results to disk or returning them to R in the form of a list. For instance:

scrape('https://peerj.com/articles/409/')

See ?scrape for more details and options.

Notes

Note that this repository contains both quickscrape and journal-scrapers. These are handled using git subtree.

noamross/quickscraper documentation built on May 23, 2019, 9:30 p.m.