Data Collection through Web Scraping
Data is not always neatly available in CSV, Excel, or text files. A lot of interesting data is published on web sites but those web sites do not make their data available for download. In this module you will learn how to retrieve data from web pages through a process known as "web scraping".
Objectives
Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to
Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to
- identify when web scraping is an appropriate data collection technique
- recognize parsable patterns in HTML
- build web scrapers in R
- use web scraping platforms
- transform scraped data into analyzable form
- export scraped data into CSV and XML files
Required Readings
- Chapters 7 and 8 in text book