Constructing a bar plot using XML in R

In the prior recipe, we learned to construct an API, studied various elements of an API, and imported data using the New York Times API. In this section, we will go a step further and import the data directly in R, parse the XML data, construct and structure our data, and plot a bar plot. For this recipe, we will use the New York Times website, but instead of real estate data, we will use the campaign finance data. The bar plot is shown as follows:

Getting ready

In order to extract data from the New York Times and generate a bar plot, we would use the XML package and the generic plot function in R.

How to do it…

To extract the data from New York Times website, we will register our key with the Campaign Finance API. Please refer to the Basic introduction to API and XML recipe to understand how to register.

Once we register our API, we can now install and load the XML package in R using the install.packages() and library() functions:

install.packages("XML"...