Scraping information of CRAN packages

(This article is adapted to the latest version of rvest package.)

In my previous post, I demonstrated how we can scrape online data using existing packages.

In this post, I will take it a bit further: I will scrape more information of CRAN packages since each of them also has a web page like this. More specifically, I want to build my own database that includes the date, name, title, version, imports, and suggests of the packages.

Although there are various ways to get the information of CRAN packages without scraping, this post is intended for showing how a typical scraping works. Similar process may apply to other situations.

Before we start, we should take a look at those web pages we are going to deal with. Modern web browsers have built-in web developer toolkit, which allows us to inspect the elements and structures of a web page. That is exactly how I locate the resources I want to scrape from a page.

For example, if you are a Firefox user, you can press F12 to show the developer tools. The same shortcut key also applies to Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. An alternative way is to click Inspect the element in the context menu of the data cell, which directly locates the element. Fortunately, CRAN pages are quite easy to handle with using XPath, as we previously played with.

A useful trick for Firefox users: You can turn on the web developer console at the web page you want to parse, and type $x("xpath") to try xpath and see whether it is able to select the elements you want. Once you figure out the right XPath, you can fill it in the R code.

Now we can get started scraping the pages. First, load the packages we need.

library(rvest)
library(rlist)
library(pipeR)

Then we scrape and parse the web page of the long table, and for each row that corresponds with a package, we need to visit its link and scrape the package page too.

The following code shows how I do it with pipeline.

# first, set urls
url <- "http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html"
pkgurl <- "http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/%s/index.html"
page <- html(url)

# set a start time so that we know how long it takes later
start <- Sys.time()

# start scraping!
data <- page %>>%
  html_node("//tr", xpath = TRUE) %>>%
  list.skip(1) %>>%
  list.map(row ~
      # xpath tip: use "|" to select multiple nodes at the same time
      row %>>%
        html_node("td[1]//text() | td[2]//a//text() | td[3]//text()", xpath = TRUE) %>>%
        html_text(trim = TRUE) %>>%
        setNames(c("date","package","title"))) %>>%

  # the table is ready, do some cleaning work
  list.update(date=as.Date(date)) %>>%

  # we only get the packages updated after July 28, 2014.
  list.filter(date >= as.Date("2014-07-28")) %>>%

  # scrape the individual page for each package
  list.update(html = {
    cat("[",format(Sys.time() - start,format="%s"),"]", .i,
      format(date,format = "%y-%m-%d"), package ,"\n", sep="\t")
    sprintf(pkgurl, package) %:>%
      content(GET(.),"parsed")
  }) %>>%

  # for each list member, html is the parsed document from which
  # we can extract detailed information
  # make good use of XPath: it can filter and select at the same time
  list.update(version = {
    page %>>%
      html_node("//tr[td[1]='Version:']//td[2]//text()", xpath = TRUE) %>>%
      html_text
  }, imports = {
    page %>>%
      html_node("//tr[td[1]='Imports:']//td[2]//a//text()", xpath = TRUE) %>>%
      html_text
  }, suggests = {
    page %>>%
      html_node("//tr[td[1]='Suggests:']//td[2]//a//text()", xpath = TRUE) %>>%
      html_text
  }) %>>%

  # remove html field
  list.update(html = NULL)

[   6.247 secs  ]   1   14-07-28    care    
[   6.654 secs  ]   2   14-07-28    cplexAPI    
[   7.062 secs  ]   3   14-07-28    cvxclustr   
[   7.472 secs  ]   4   14-07-28    discreteRV  
[   7.877 secs  ]   5   14-07-28    drfit   
[   8.284 secs  ]   6   14-07-28    GeneNet 
[   8.69 secs   ]   7   14-07-28    Gmisc   
[   9.097 secs  ]   8   14-07-28    HDPenReg    
[   9.501 secs  ]   9   14-07-28    HTSCluster  
[   10.35 secs  ]   10  14-07-28    HTSDiff 
[   10.76 secs  ]   11  14-07-28    httr    
[   11.16 secs  ]   12  14-07-28    jaatha  
[   11.57 secs  ]   13  14-07-28    LowRankQP   
[   11.98 secs  ]   14  14-07-28    ltbayes 
[   12.38 secs  ]   15  14-07-28    peptider    
[   12.79 secs  ]   16  14-07-28    RJSONIO 
[   13.2 secs   ]   17  14-07-28    Rtsne   
[   13.6 secs   ]   18  14-07-28    rYoutheria  
[   14.01 secs  ]   19  14-07-28    sda 

Note that Imports and Suggests are both vector-valued, which makes the data non-tabular. Therefore, I use list to store the data directly. With the assistance of rlist package, the data processing with lists is much easier and cleaner.

Let's take a look at the structure of the data we get.

str(head(data))

List of 6
 $ :List of 6
  ..$ date    : Date[1:1], format: "2014-07-28"
  ..$ package : chr "care"
  ..$ title   : chr "High-Dimensional Regression and CAR Score Variable Selection"
  ..$ version : chr "1.1.5"
  ..$ imports : chr(0) 
  ..$ suggests: chr "crossval"
 $ :List of 6
  ..$ date    : Date[1:1], format: "2014-07-28"
  ..$ package : chr "cplexAPI"
  ..$ title   : chr "R Interface to C API of IBM ILOG CPLEX"
  ..$ version : chr "1.2.11"
  ..$ imports : chr(0) 
  ..$ suggests: chr(0) 
 $ :List of 6
  ..$ date    : Date[1:1], format: "2014-07-28"
  ..$ package : chr "cvxclustr"
  ..$ title   : chr "Splitting methods for convex clustering"
  ..$ version : chr "1.1.1"
  ..$ imports : chr(0) 
  ..$ suggests: chr "ggplot2"
 $ :List of 6
  ..$ date    : Date[1:1], format: "2014-07-28"
  ..$ package : chr "discreteRV"
  ..$ title   : chr "Functions to create and manipulate discrete random variables"
  ..$ version : chr "1.1.2"
  ..$ imports : chr(0) 
  ..$ suggests: chr [1:4] "testthat" "roxygen2" "MASS" "plyr"
 $ :List of 6
  ..$ date    : Date[1:1], format: "2014-07-28"
  ..$ package : chr "drfit"
  ..$ title   : chr "Dose-response data evaluation"
  ..$ version : chr "0.6.3"
  ..$ imports : chr [1:3] "MASS" "RODBC" "drc"
  ..$ suggests: chr(0) 
 $ :List of 6
  ..$ date    : Date[1:1], format: "2014-07-28"
  ..$ package : chr "GeneNet"
  ..$ title   : chr "Modeling and Inferring Gene Networks"
  ..$ version : chr "1.2.10"
  ..$ imports : chr(0) 
  ..$ suggests: chr(0) 

Now we can use rlist functions to do more interesting things with it.