Scraping tables on multiple web pages with rvest in R

r, rvest, web-scraping

Solution

One way would be to make vector of all the `urls` you are interested in and then use `sapply`:

library(rvest)

years <- 1970:2016
urls <- paste0("http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIL/", years, ".shtml")
# head(urls)

get_table <- function(url) {
  url %>%
    read_html() %>%
    html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="div_team_batting"]/table[1]') %>% 
    html_table()
}

results <- sapply(urls, get_table)

`results` should be a list of 47 `data.frame` objects; each should be named with the `url` (i.e., year) they represent. That is, `results[1]` corresponds to 1970, and `results[47]` corresponds to 2016.

Problem

I am new to web scraping and am trying to scrape tables on multiple web pages. Here is the site: http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIL/2016.shtml I am able to scrape a table on one page rather easily using `rvest`. There are multiple tables, but I only wanted to scrape the first one, here is my code ``` library(rvest) url4 <- "http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIL/2016.shtml" Brewers2016 <- url4 %>% read_html() %>% html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="div_team_batting"]/table[1]') %>% html_table() Brewers2016 <- as.data.frame(Brewers2016) ``` The problem is that I want to scrape the first table on the page dating back to 1970. There is a link specifying the previous year at the top left corner just above the table. Does anybody know how I can do this? I am also open to different ways of doing this, for example, a package other than rvest that might work better. I used rvest because it's the one I started learning.

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