R help - Oct 2013 - Web Scraping

Hello everybody,
I just started using R and I'm presenting a poster for R day at Kennesaw
State University and I really need some help in terms of web scraping.
I'm trying to extract used cars data from www.cars.com to include the
mileage, year, model, make, price, CARFAX availability and Technology
package availability. I've done some research, and everything points to the
XML package and RCurl package. I also got my hands on a function that would
capture all the text in the web page and store as a huge character vector.
I've never done data mining before so when i read the help documents on the
packages i mentioned earlier is like reading Chinese. I would appreciate it
if you guide me through this process of data extraction.
Here's an example of what the data would look like:

Cost    Year    Mileage    Tech    CARFAX    Make      Model
$32000 1999   57,987      1         FREE        Audi       A4

Here's the link to the search:-
http://www.cars.com/for-sale/searchresults.action?stkTyp=U&tracktype=usedcc&mkId=20049&AmbMkId=20049&AmbMkNm=Audi&make=Audi&AmbMdNm=A4&model=A4&mdId=20596&AmbMdId=20596&rd=100&zc=30062&searchSource=QUICK_FORM&enableSeo=1

I'm not expecting you to write the whole code for me, but just some
guidance and where to start and what functions would be useful in my
situation.
Thanks a lot anyway.

Regards,
M. Samir Anany

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Hi,

I have a short demo at https://gist.github.com/izahn/5785265 that
might get you started.

Best,
Ista

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Mohamed Anany
<melsayed at students.kennesaw.edu> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> I just started using R and I'm presenting a poster for R day at
Kennesaw
> State University and I really need some help in terms of web scraping.
> I'm trying to extract used cars data from www.cars.com to include the
> mileage, year, model, make, price, CARFAX availability and Technology
> package availability. I've done some research, and everything points to
the
> XML package and RCurl package. I also got my hands on a function that would
> capture all the text in the web page and store as a huge character vector.
> I've never done data mining before so when i read the help documents on
the
> packages i mentioned earlier is like reading Chinese. I would appreciate it
> if you guide me through this process of data extraction.
> Here's an example of what the data would look like:
>
> Cost    Year    Mileage    Tech    CARFAX    Make      Model
> $32000 1999   57,987      1         FREE        Audi       A4
>
> Here's the link to the search:-
>
http://www.cars.com/for-sale/searchresults.action?stkTyp=U&tracktype=usedcc&mkId=20049&AmbMkId=20049&AmbMkNm=Audi&make=Audi&AmbMdNm=A4&model=A4&mdId=20596&AmbMdId=20596&rd=100&zc=30062&searchSource=QUICK_FORM&enableSeo=1
>
> I'm not expecting you to write the whole code for me, but just some
> guidance and where to start and what functions would be useful in my
> situation.
> Thanks a lot anyway.
>
> Regards,
> M. Samir Anany
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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