CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rweb-scraping
pssguy
pssguy

Reputation: 3515

How can I create a dataframe from preformatted HTML text

I want to analyze some earthquake data in R. A typical (of many) output in source HTML would be

<pre>
Year,Month,Day,Time(hhmmss.mm)UTC,Latitude,Longitude,Magnitude,Depth,Catalog
2012, 01,   01,  003008.77,      12.008,    143.487,  5.1,      35,  PDE-W
.....
</pre>

I have managed to get the comma-separated-data into a character string where \n should seperate rows but am not clear how to proceed further - and am not sure that is best approach anyway. 

 library(XML)
 url <- "http://neic.usgs.gov/cgi-bin/epic/epic.cgi?SEARCHMETHOD=1&FILEFORMAT=6&SEARCHRANGE=HH&SYEAR=2012&SMONTH=01&SDAY=01&EYEAR=2012&EMONTH=1&EDAY=31&LMAG=4&UMAG=&NDEP1=&NDEP2=&IO1=&IO2=&CLAT=0.0&CLON=0.0&CRAD=0.0&SUBMIT=Submit+Search"
 data <- xpathSApply(basicInfo, "//*/pre/text()", xmlValue)
 str(data) #chr "\n Year,Month,Day, .... Catalog\n  2012,

Any help appreciated

Upvotes: 1

Views: 229

Answers (1)

agstudy
agstudy

Reputation: 121578

data.df <- read.table(text = data, fill=TRUE, sep = ',',header=TRUE)

and you get 

head(data.df)
  Year Month Day Time.hhmmss.mm.UTC Latitude Longitude Magnitude Depth Catalog
1 2012     1   1            3008.77   12.008   143.487       5.1    35   PDE-W
2 2012     1   1            4342.77   12.014   143.536       4.4    35   PDE-W
3 2012     1   1            5008.04  -11.366   166.218       5.3    67   PDE-W
4 2012     1   1           12207.66   -6.747   130.007       4.2   145   PDE-W
5 2012     1   1           23521.11   23.472    91.834       4.6    27   PDE-W
6 2012     1   1           24036.40    6.677   -73.110       4.0   158   PDE-W

Upvotes: 3

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