I have a project where I should scrape a series of articles from news sites. I am interested in the headline and text of the news. In most cases, the site maintains a base URL, for example:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/why_rich_people_love_poor_immigrants.html https://tmp.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/01/california_begins_giving_drivers_licenses_to_illegal_aliens.html
As there are a so many articles (more than 1000) to download, I thought of creating a function to download all data automatically. A vector would provide all web addresses (one per line):
article
[1] "https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/why_rich_people_love_poor_immigrants.html"
[2] "https://tmp.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/01/california_begins_giving_drivers_licenses_to_illegal_aliens.html"
[3] "https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/immigrants_will_not_fund_our_retirement.html"> str(article)
chr [1:3] "https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/why_rich_people_love_poor_immigrants.html" ...
> summary(article)
Length Class Mode
3 character character
As a result, the script would use the vector as a source for the addresses and create a dataframe with the title and text of each article. But some errors pop up. Here are the codes I wrote, based on a series of Stack Overflow posts:
Packages
library(rvest)
library(purrr)
library(xml2)
library(dplyr)
library(readr)
Importing CSV and exporting as a vector
base <- read_csv(file.choose(), col_names = FALSE)
article <- pull(base,X1)
First try
articles_final <- map_df(article, function(i){
pages<-read_html(article)
title <-
article %>% map_chr(. %>% html_node("h1") %>% html_text())
content <-
article %>% map_chr(. %>% html_nodes('.article_body span') %>% html_text() %>% paste(., collapse = ""))
article_table <- data.frame("Title" = title, "Content" = content)
return(article_table)
})
Second try
map_df(1:3, function(i){
page <- read_html(sprintf(article,i))
data.frame(Title = html_text(html_nodes(page,'.h1')),
Content= html_text(html_nodes(page,'.article_body span')),
Site = "American Thinker"
)
}) -> articles_final
In both cases, I am getting the following error while running these functions:
Error in doc_parse_file (con, encoding = encoding, as_html = as_html, options = options):
Expecting a single string value:
[type = character; extent = 3].
I need this to download and analyse articles
Thank you very much for your help.
edit
I tried the code suggested bellow:
I tried and it dod not work, some problem with my coding:
> map_dfc(.x = article,
+ .f = function(x){
+ foo <- tibble(Title = read_html(x) %>%
+ html_nodes("h1") %>%
+ html_text() %>%
+ .[nchar(.) > 0],
+ Content = read_html(x) %>%
+ html_nodes("p") %>%
+ html_text(),
+ Site = "AmericanThinker")%>%
+ filter(nchar(Content) > 0)
+ }
+ ) -> out
Error: Argument 3 must be length 28, not 46
But as you see a new error pops up