There are numerous ways to retrieve text from the web. The previous section used the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) through the httr package to retrieve text from the web. A combination of substr() and regexpr() was then used to extract only a small piece of information from it.
This section will show you how to retrieve text from the web using two different packages:
- rvest: This can easily perform common web scrapping tasks
- rtweet: It works with Twitter's web API to gather data
There are numerous ways to use data gathered this way. To name a few, it could be used to develop stock trading, marketing strategies, train chatbots, run sentiment analysis, seeks candidates for a job, or phrase click baits. Our final goal in this chapter will be to check which packages are most tweeted by the R community. Before going any further, there is a very...
