Skip to main content

Course

Web Scraping in R

Intermediate

4.8+

Updated 04/2025

Learn how to efficiently collect and download data from any website using R.

Start Course for Free

Included withPremium or Teams

RData Preparation4 hours13 videos45 Exercises3,600 XP13,576Statement of Accomplishment

Create Your Free Account

or

By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.

Training 2 or more people?

Try DataCamp for Business

Loved by learners at thousands of companies

Course Description

Have you ever come across a website that displays a lot of data such as statistics, product reviews, or prices in a format that’s not data analysis-ready? Often, authorities and other data providers publish their data in neatly formatted tables. However, not all of these sites include a download button, but don’t despair. In this course, you’ll learn how to efficiently collect and download data from any website using R. You'll learn how to automate the scraping and parsing of Wikipedia using the rvest and httr packages. Through hands-on exercises, you’ll also expand your understanding of HTML and CSS, the building blocks of web pages, as you make your data harvesting workflows less error-prone and more efficient.

Prerequisites

Intermediate R Introduction to the Tidyverse

1

Introduction to HTML and Web Scraping

Introduction to HTML

Read in HTML

Beware of syntax errors!

Navigating HTML

Select all children of a list

Parse hyperlinks into a data frame

Scrape your first table

The right order of table elements

Turn a table into a data frame with html_table()

2

Navigation and Selection with CSS

Introduction to CSS

Select multiple HTML types

Order CSS selectors by the number of results

CSS classes and IDs

Identify the correct selector types

Leverage the uniqueness of IDs

Select the last child with a pseudo-class

CSS combinators

Select direct descendants with the child combinator

How many elements get returned?

Simply the best!

Not every sibling is the same

3

Advanced Selection with XPATH

Introduction to XPATH

Find the correct CSS equivalent

Select by class and ID with XPATH

Use predicates to select nodes based on their children

XPATH functions and advanced predicates

Find a more elegant XPATH alternative

Get to know the position() function

Extract nodes based on the number of their children

The XPATH text() function

The shortcomings of html_table() with badly structured tables

Select directly from a parent element with XPATH's text()

Combine extracted data into a data frame

Scrape an element based on its text

4

Scraping Best Practices

The nature of HTTP requests

Which of these statements about HTTP is false?

Do it the httr way

Houston, we got a 404!

Telling who you are with custom user agents

Check out your user agent

Add a custom user agent

How to be gentle and slow down your requests

Custom arguments for throttled functions

Apply throttling to a multi-page crawler

Recap: Web Scraping in R

Web Scraping in R

Course
Complete

Earn Statement of Accomplishment

Add this credential to your LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV
Share it on social media and in your performance review

Included withPremium or Teams

Don’t just take our word for it

*4.8

from 22 reviews

86%

14%

0%

0%

0%

Highest to Lowest
Lowest to Highest
Most recent
Top reviews

Zia Zuhaib

3 days

Beril

3 days

explains it well

usman

5 days

Ryan

6 days

Muhammad Sajid

7 days

This is a fantastic course for anyone looking to get started with web scraping in R. It strikes the perfect balance between theory and hands-on practice. The instructor explains HTML, CSS, XPath, and HTTP concepts clearly, and the use of rvest, httr, and purrr makes real-world scraping feel achievable even for beginners. The lessons build up gradually, and by the end, you’ll feel confident scraping structured and messy web pages alike.Highly recommended for R users who want to automate data collection and explore web data responsibly. Happy scraping!

usman

8 days

Clear and practical course! Loved learning how to use CSS and XPATH for web scraping with rvest. Definitely recommend for beginners in data scraping.

Zia Zuhaib

"explains it well"

Beril

usman

Join over 16 million learners and start Web Scraping in R today!

Create Your Free Account

or

By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.