Workshop in Cape Town: Web Scraping with R

Join Andrew Collier and Hanjo Odendaal for a workshop on using R for Web Scraping.

Who should attend?

This workshop is aimed at beginner and intermediate R users who want to learn more about using R for data acquisition and management, with a specific focus on web scraping.

What will you learn?

You will learn:

• data manipulation with dplyr, tidyr and purrr;
• tools for accessing the DOM;
• scraping static sites with rvest;
• scraping dynamic sites with RSelenium; and
• setting up an automated scraper in the cloud.

See programme below for further details.

There are just 20 seats available. A 10% discount is available for groups of 4 or more people from a single organisation attending both days.

Email training@exegetic.biz if you have any questions about the workshop.

Register

Programme

Day 1

• Motivating Example
• R and the tidyverse
  • Vectors, Lists and Data Frames
  • Loading data from a file
  • Manipulating Data Frames with dplyr
  • Pivoting with tidyr
  • Functional programming with purrr
• Introduction to scraping
  • Ethics
  • DOM
  • Developer Tools
  • CSS and XPath
  • robots.txt and site map
• Scraping a static site with rvest
  • What happens under the hood
  • What the hell is curl?
  • Assisted Assignment: Movie information from IMDB

Day 2

• Case Study: Investigating drug tests using rvest
• Interacting with APIs
  • Using XHR to find an API
  • Building wrappers around APIs
• Scraping a dynamic site with RSelenium
  • Why RSelenium is needed
  • Navigation around web-pages
  • Combining RSelenium with rvest
  • Useful JavaScript tools
  • Case Study
• Deploying a Scraper in the Cloud
  • Launching and connecting to an EC2 instance
  • Headless browsers
  • Automation with cron

Register