How to Scrape the Web in R
In a few short lines of code, we’ll get any Billboard chart for any date in history
I used to think web scraping sounded complicated. You’d have to decode a bunch of HTML and Javascript and do messy hacking to get at what you wanted.
But once I took a crack at it using my favourite language of R, I realized that tools exist to make it very tidy and straightforward, and I was surprised by how quickly and easily I was pulling facts, tables, images and various other assets from websites.