Earlier this year I had a lot of fun learning how to use the BeautifulSoup and mechanize modules in python to scrape websites. My goal was to scrape the European Parliament website for information on the activity levels of the different MEPs. I struggl...
You can now subscribe to almost any content on the ProgrammingR website, including the job listings. To be notified of job listings as soon as they are posted, click the “R Jobs” link above and follow the instructions on that page to add the jobs feed to your feed reader.Because of this change, I will
The post Subscriptions...
Kay Cichini recently wrote a word-cloud R function called GScholarScraper on his blog which when given a search string will scrape the associated search results returned by Google Scholar, across pages, and then produce a word-cloud visualisation. This was of interest to me because around the same time I posted an independent Google Scholar scraper function get_google_scholar_df() 
(This is a follow-up to my previous post on the topic.)I was encouraged by the appearance of two R-based Scholar-scrapers, within a week of each other. One, by Kay Cichini, converts the page URLs into text mode and scrapes from there (There's a slightl...
Google+ just opened up to allow brands, groups, and organizations to create their very own public Pages on the site. This didn’t bother me to much but I’ve been hearing a lot about Google+ lately so figured it might be fun to set up an XPath scraper to extract information from each post of a status 
Seeing as I’m on a bit of an XPath kick as of late, I figured I’d continue on scraping search results but this time from Yahoo.com Rolling my own version of xpathSApply to handle NULL elements seems to have done the trick and so far it’s been relatively easy to do the scraping. I’ve created 
I wanted to play around with the Facebook Graph API using the Graph API Explorer page as a coding exercise. This facility allows one to use the API with a temporary authorisation token. Now, I don’t know how to make an R package for the proper API where you have to register for an API key and 
Based on my previous post on Web Scraping I coded and uploaded the Function "GScholarScraper" HERE for testing!The function will pull all (!) results, processing pages in chunks of 100 results/titles, and return a file with all titles, links, etc. It w...
This is a followup to a post I uploaded earlier today about web scraping data off Google Scholar. In that post I was frustrated because I’m not smart enough to use xpathSApply to get the kind of results I wanted. However fast-forward to the evening whilst having dinner with a friend, as a passing remark, 
I wanted to scrape the information returned by a Google Scholar web search into an R data frame as a quick XPath exercise. The following will successfully extract the ‘title’, ‘url’ , ‘publication’ and ‘description’. If any of these fields are not available, as in the case of a citation, the corresponding cell in the data 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
