Scraping data from a html table

Question

I'm trying to extract data on invasive plant species locations from the CABI invasive species compendium using the rvest package.

Having looked at a few tutorials I have figured out that I should be able to scrape data from tables fairly easily. However, I keep running into difficulties.

Let's say I want location data for the species Brassica tournefortii. I should be able to use this code, which uses the techniques outlined here to get details of the locations the species has been recorded.

 library(rvest)
 isc<-read_html("http://www.cabi.org/isc/datasheet/50069")
 isc %>% 
 html_node("#toDistributionTable td:nth-child(1)") %>%
 html_text()

However, running this code I get the error

Error: No matches

I am completely new to webscraping. Am I doing something horribly wrong?

Answer 1

First, I wish I could upvote you more. Finally a scraping question that is not $SPORTSBALL or $MONEY related! :-)

That site is evil. It uses embedded namespaces which need to be dealt with, which also means using the xml2 package:

library(rvest)
library(xml2)

isc <- read_html("http://www.cabi.org/isc/datasheet/50069")

ns <- xml_ns(isc)

xml_text(xml_find_all(isc, xpath="//div[@id='toDistributionTable']/table/tbody/tr/td[1]", ns))

##  [1] "ASIA"                           "Azerbaijan"                    
##  [3] "Bhutan"                         "China"                         
##  [5] "-Tibet"                         "India"                         
##  [7] "-Delhi"                         "-Indian Punjab"                
##  [9] "-Rajasthan"                     "-Uttar Pradesh"                
## [11] "Iran"                           "Iraq"                          
## [13] "Israel"                         "Jordan"                        
## [15] "Kuwait"                         "Lebanon"                       
## [17] "Oman"                           "Pakistan"                      
## [19] "Qatar"                          "Saudi Arabia"                  
## [21] "Syria"                          "Turkey"                        
## [23] "Turkmenistan"                   "United Arab Emirates"          
## [25] "Uzbekistan"                     "Yemen"                         
## [27] "AFRICA"                         "Algeria"                       
## [29] "Egypt"                          "Libya"                         
## [31] "Morocco"                        "South Africa"                  
## [33] "Tunisia"                        "NORTH AMERICA"                 
## [35] "Mexico"                         "USA"                           
## [37] "-Arizona"                       "-California"                   
## [39] "-Nevada"                        "-New Mexico"                   
## [41] "-Texas"                         "-Utah"                         
## [43] "SOUTH AMERICA"                  "Chile"                         
## [45] "EUROPE"                         "Belgium"                       
## [47] "Cyprus"                         "Denmark"                       
## [49] "France"                         "Greece"                        
## [51] "Ireland"                        "Italy"                         
## [53] "Spain"                          "Sweden"                        
## [55] "UK"                             "-England and Wales"            
## [57] "-Scotland"                      "OCEANIA"                       
## [59] "Australia"                      "-Australian Northern Territory"
## [61] "-New South Wales"               "-Queensland"                   
## [63] "-South Australia"               "-Tasmania"                     
## [65] "-Victoria"                      "-Western Australia"            
## [67] "New Zealand"