---
title: "selenider and rvest"
output: rmarkdown::html_vignette
vignette: >
%\VignetteIndexEntry{selenider and rvest}
%\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown}
%\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8}
---
```{r, include = FALSE}
available <- selenider::selenider_available()
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
collapse = TRUE,
comment = "#>",
eval = available
)
```
```{r, eval = !available, include = FALSE}
message("Selenider is not available")
```
selenider can be a useful add-on to rvest, for when scraping data requires
interaction with a website.
rvest is very similar to selenider, but is designed for static webpages rather
than interactive ones.
```{r setup}
library(rvest)
library(selenider)
```
To start, let's open <https://www.r-project.org/>
```{r}
open_url("https://www.r-project.org/")
```
First, we will interact with the website with selenider. We would like
to find the most recent post by R on Mastodon, and follow the link to the
original post.
```{r}
s(".mt-timeline") |>
find_element("article") |>
elem_attr("data-location") |>
open_url()
```
Now, we would like to parse the text of the post using `rvest::html_text2()`.
We can do this in two ways, either by locating the element containing the post
using selenider then parsing it using rvest, or by parsing the entire page using
rvest and finding the element after. The two methods are very similar, since
selenider and rvest use a very similar syntax, except rvest uses the `html_`
prefix rather than the `elem_` prefix.
We can convert between selenider elements and rvest (or more precisely, xml2)
documents using `rvest::read_html()` or `xml2::read_html()`.
Note that when converting elements to rvest nodes, the element will be wrapped
in a `<body>` tag.
```{r}
# First method
rvest_element <- s(".columns-area") |>
find_element(".status__content") |>
read_html()
rvest_element
html_text2(rvest_element)
```
Reading the HTML of an entire page can be done using `get_page_source()`.
Note that `rvest::html_element()` is equivalent to `find_element()`, but
works only on static HTML.
```{r}
get_page_source() |>
html_element(".columns-area") |>
html_element(".status__content") |>
html_text2()
```