I am web scraping a page at
http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog#_r=&collection=&country=&dtype=&from=1890&page=1&ps=100&sid=&sk=&sort_by=nation&sort_order=&to=2017&topic=&view=s&vk
From this url, I have built up a dataframe through the following code:
dflist <- map(.x = 1:417, .f = function(x) {
Sys.sleep(5)
url <-
("http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog#_r=&collection=&country=&dtype=&from=1890&page=1&ps=100&sid=&sk=&sort_by=nation&sort_order=&to=2017&topic=&view=s&vk=")
read_html(url) %>%
html_nodes(".title a") %>%
html_text() %>%
as.data.frame()
}) %>% do.call(rbind, .)
I have repeated the same code in order to get all the data I was interested in
and it seems to work perfectly, although is of course a little slow due to the
Sys.sleep() thing.
My issue has raised once I have tried to scrape the single projects descriptions
that should be included in the dataframe.
For instance, the first project description is at
http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/7118/study-description
the second project description is at
http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/6606/study-description
and so forth.
My problem is that I can't find a dynamic way to scrape all the
projects' pages and insert them in the data frame, being the number in the
URLs not progressive nor at the end of the link.
To make things clearer, this is the structure of the website I am scraping:
1.http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog#_r=&collection=&country=&dtype=&from=1890&page=1&ps=100&sid=&sk=&sort_by=nation&sort_order=&to=2017&topic=&view=s&vk
1.1. http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/7118
1.1.a http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/7118/related_materials
1.1.b http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/7118/study-description
1.1.c. http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/7118/data_dictionary
I have scraped successfully level 1. but cannot level 1.1.b. (study-description)
, the one I am interested in, since the dynamic element of the URL (in this
case: 7118) is not consistent in the website's above 6000 pages of that
level.
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