R - Scraping with rvest package

Question

I'm trying to get the data from the "Team Statistics" table on this webpage:

https://www.hockey-reference.com/teams/CGY/2010.html

I don't have a lot of experience with web scraping, but have made a few attempts with the XML package and now with the rvest package:

library(rvest)

url <- html("https://www.hockey-reference.com/teams/CGY/2010.html")

url %>%
        html_node(xpath = "//*[@id='team_stats']") 

And end up with what appears to be a single node:

{xml_node}
<table class="sortable stats_table" id="team_stats" data-cols-to-freeze="1">
[1] <caption>Team Statistics Table</caption>
[2] <colgroup>\n<col>\n<col>\n<col>\n<col>\n<col>\n<col>\n<col>\ ...
[3] <thead><tr>\n<th aria-label="Team" data-stat="team_name" sco ...
[4] <tbody>\n<tr>\n<th scope="row" class="left " data-stat="team ...

How do I parse this to just get the header and information in the two row table?

Answer 1

You just need to add html_table at the end of the chain:

library(rvest)

url <- read_html("https://www.hockey-reference.com/teams/CGY/2010.html")

url %>%
  html_node(xpath = "//*[@id='team_stats']") %>% 
  html_table()

Alternatively:

library(rvest)

url %>%  
  html_table() %>% 
  .[[1]]

Both solutions return:

            Team AvAge GP  W  L OL PTS  PTS%  GF  GA   SRS  SOS TG/G PP PPO   PP% PPA PPOA   PK% SH SHA    S  S%   SA   SV%   PDO
1 Calgary Flames  28.8 82 40 32 10  90 0.549 201 203 -0.03 0.04 5.05 43 268 16.04  54  305 82.30  7   1 2350 8.6 2367 0.916 100.1
2 League Average  27.9 82 41 31 10  92 0.561 233 233  0.00 0.00 5.68 56 304 18.23  56  304 81.77  6   6 2486 9.1 2479 0.911    NA