Select Nodes from an HTML Document — html_nodes — rvest
Have you ever wondered how websites are made up of all those pictures, links, and text? At the core of every website is HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). It helps display everything you see on a webpage. But what if you wanted to gather specific information, like all the links from a page or the titles of articles? That’s where html_nodes
comes in! This guide will teach you how to select specific parts of a website's code using a tool called rvest
in R. Even if you're new to programming or don't know much about web scraping, this blog post will break it down in a way that's easy to understand.
What Is HTML?
Before diving into html_nodes
, let's understand HTML. Websites use HTML to organize content, like text, links, and images, into a structure that your browser can read and display. HTML uses tags like <h1>
for headers, <p>
for paragraphs, and <a>
for links. Think of HTML as the blueprint for a website.
Here’s an example:
<h1>Welcome to My Blog</h1>
<p>This is a blog post about web scraping.</p>
<a href="http://example.com">Click here to read more</a>
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting information from websites. Instead of copying and pasting, you can use programs to collect the data. For example, if you wanted to gather all the headlines from a news website, web scraping can make that task easier.