xmlvalue vs XMLAttributeValue

Question

I parsed an XML file using the following code and got the results as below:

url = htmlTreeParse("http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/candy-crush-saga/", useInternalNodes = T)
ItemList =getNodeSet(url, "//li/a/@title")


>ItemList
[[1]]
           title 
"Angry Birds Star Wars HD" 
attr(,"class")
[1] "XMLAttributeValue"

[[2]]
           title 
"iShuffle Bowling 2" 
attr(,"class")
[1] "XMLAttributeValue"

 ....
[[15]]
           title 
"Angry Birds Star Wars Free" 
attr(,"class")
[1] "XMLAttributeValue"

attr(,"class")
[1] "XMLNodeSet"

My issue is I'd like to grab the names of the game by parsing it. So I tried this code (based on my experience dealing with xmlValue ) -

IL <- lapply(ItemList, function(x) c(xmlValue(x), xmlAttrs(x)[["href"]]))

But it ends up giving this error :

Error in UseMethod("xmlValue") : no applicable method for 'xmlValue' applied to an object of class "XMLAttributeValue"

I did extensive googling but cannot find the solution to deal with XMLAttributeValue. Can someone give me a hint and let me know the difference between xmlValue and xmlAttributeValue?

Answer 1

Thanks for the updated question and added example URL!

I think with the @title you are already into the attributes, that's why you could not parse the xmlValue. What about e.g.:

> htmlTreeParse("http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/candy-crush-saga/", useInternalNodes = TRUE)
> xpathSApply(url, "//li/a", function(x) c(xmlValue(x), xmlAttrs(x)[["href"]]))

---

Update: to filter your results, you might try only xpathSApply the "Customers Also Bought" div:

> xpathSApply(url, "//div[@class='app_content_section']/ul/li/a", function(x) c(xmlValue(x), xmlAttrs(x)[["href"]]))