R devel - Apr 2013 - extracting tables from web pages?

Hello:


       What tools would you recommend for extracting the table of 
members of the US House of representatives from 
"http://house.gov/representatives/" and 
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives_by_age"?



       I started writing something using getURL{RCurl}.  However, I'm 
getting bogged down manually selecting character sequences to search for 
and split on.


       Thanks,
       Spencer Graves

On 25 April 2013 at 13:00, Spencer Graves wrote:
| Hello:
| 
| 
|        What tools would you recommend for extracting the table of 
| members of the US House of representatives from 
| "http://house.gov/representatives/" and 
|
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives_by_age"?
| 
| 
| 
|        I started writing something using getURL{RCurl}.  However, I'm 
| getting bogged down manually selecting character sequences to search for 
| and split on.

You could try your own sos package to search what others have done here; the
XML package is popular for it but the whole scheme is fraught with little
pitfalls as html very definitely is not a good format for data-delivery, and
an html page clearly is no API for data access.

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com

Hello,

The following seems to work.

library(XML)

url <- "http://house.gov/representatives/"
dat <- readHTMLTable(readLines(url), which=1, header=TRUE)
str(dat)
head(dat)


Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

Em 25-04-2013 21:00, Spencer Graves escreveu:
> Hello:
>
>
>        What tools would you recommend for extracting the table of
> members of the US House of representatives from
> "http://house.gov/representatives/" and
>
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives_by_age"?
>
>
>
>        I started writing something using getURL{RCurl}.  However, I'm
> getting bogged down manually selecting character sequences to search for
> and split on.
>
>
>        Thanks,
>        Spencer Graves
>
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