Retrieving data from Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia project developed collaboratively by multiple people across the world. This is a rich source of information, and we can find content about anything in this world. In this section, we are going to check out the ways to extract the content from Wikipedia for our analysis. We will concentrate only on the tabular content.

We will consider the Wikipedia page on List of countries and dependencies by population. This page has tabular content about the countries and their population. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Now, we will see how to bring the preceding tabular content to R so that we can perform some computation. Before going into the coding, you have to understand that the method explored is just one way of implementing it. This can be performed in multiple ways.

For the method we are discussing, we need to load the package httr and then read the URL of the mentioned Wikipedia page. We need to pass the URL to...