Google slightly changed the html code it uses for hyperlinks on search pages last Thursday, thus causing one of my scripts to stop working. Thankfully, this is easily solved in R thanks to the XML package and the power and simplicity of XPath expressions: Lovely jubbly! P.S. I know that there is an API of 
The outcome presented above will not be very useful to most of you - still, this could be a good example for what possibly can be done via web scraping in R.Background: TIRIS is the federal geo-statistical service of North-Tyrol, Austria. One of many g...
OUTDATED! Please see the update HERE!...When reading Scott Chemberlain's last post about web-scraping I felt it was time to pick up and complete an idea that I was brooding over for some time now:When a scientist aims out for a new project the firs...
Picking up on Paul Bradshaw’s post A quick exercise for aspiring data journalists which hints at how you can use Google Spreadsheets to grab – and explore – a mortality dataset highlighted by Ben Goldacre in DIY statistical analysis: experience the thrill of touching real data, I thought I’d describe a quick way of analysing 
In R it's quite easy to pull out anything from a webpage and I'll show a little exercise in doing so.Here I retrieve all blog addresses from R-bloggers by the function readLines() and some subsequent data processing.Read more »
In an ideal world, all bioinformatics tools would be made available via the Web as a web service with an API, as well as a standalone package to download for local use. This is rarely the case and sometimes, even where one or the other is available, factors such as cost come into play. So 
In my last post, I went through a lot of effort to scrape the PMI index off the ISM website. It turns out that was unnecessary effort, as commentator "senne" pointed out that this index is available from FRED, with the symbol NAPM. &nbs...
John Hussman has a Recession Warning Composite that I am attempting to replicate/improve. The underlying data seems to be easy enough to get from FRED using the quantmod package in R. I don't quite understand the index Hussman is using for commercial...
A reader asked a question about data from environment canada. He wanted to know if that data could somehow be integrated into the RGhcnV3 package. That turned out to be a bit more challenging that I expected. In short order I’d found a couple other people who had done something similar. DrJ of course was 
This past Friday, the web portal to the US Federal government, USA.gov, organized hackathons across the US for programmers and data scientists to work with and analyze the data from their link-shortening service. It turns out that if you shorten a web link with bit.ly, the shortened link looks like 1.usa.gov/V6NpL (that one goes to
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
