Reading data from HTML tables
According to the traditional document formats on the World Wide Web, most texts and data are served in HTML pages. We can often find interesting pieces of information in for example HTML tables, from which it's pretty easy to copy and paste data into an Excel spreadsheet, save that to disk, and load it to R afterwards. But it takes time, it's boring, and can be automated anyway.
Such HTML tables can be easily generated with the help of the aforementioned API of the Customer Compliant Database. If we do not set the required output format for which we used XML or JSON earlier, then the browser returns a HTML table instead, as you should be able to see in the following screenshot:
Well, in the R console it's a bit more complicated as the browser sends some non-default HTTP headers while using curl, so the preceding URL would simply return a JSON list. To get HTML, let the server know that we expect HTML output. To do so, simply set the appropriate...
