Reputation: 629
Okay, So I am stuck on what seems would be a simple web scrape. My goal is to scrape Morningstar.com to retrieve a fund name based on the entered url. Here is the example of my code:
library(rvest)
url <- html("http://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/fbalx/quote.html")
url %>%
read_html() %>%
html_node('r_title')
I would expect it to return the name Fidelity Balanced Fund, but instead I get the following error: {xml_missing}
Suggestions?
Aaron
edit:
I also tried scraping via XHR request, but I think my issue is not knowing what css selector or xpath to select to find the appropriate data.
XHR code:
get.morningstar.Table1 <- function(Symbol.i,htmlnode){
try(res <- GET(url = "http://quotes.morningstar.com/fundq/c-header",
query = list(
t=Symbol.i,
region="usa",
culture="en-US",
version="RET",
test="QuoteiFrame"
)
))
tryCatch(x <- content(res) %>%
html_nodes(htmlnode) %>%
html_text() %>%
trimws()
, error = function(e) x <-NA)
return(x)
} #HTML Node in this case is a vkey
still the same question is, am I using the correct css/xpath to look up? The XHR code works great for requests that have a clear css selector.
Upvotes: 0
Views: 142
Reputation: 386
OK, so it looks like the page dynamically loads the section you are targeting, so it doesn't actually get pulled in by read_html(). Interestingly, this part of the page also doesn't load using an RSelenium headless browser.
I was able to get this to work by scraping the page title (which is actually hidden on the page) and doing some regex to get rid of the junk:
library(rvest)
url <- 'http://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/fbalx/quote.html'
page <- read_html(url)
title <- page %>%
html_node('title') %>%
html_text()
symbol <- 'FBALX'
regex <- paste0(symbol, " (.*) ", symbol, ".*")
cleanTitle <- gsub(regex, '\\1', title)
As a side note, and for your future use, your first call to html_node() should include a "." before the class name you are targeting:
mypage %>%
html_node('.myClass')
Again, this doesn't help in this specific case, since the page is failing to load the section we are trying to scrape.
A final note: other sites contain the same info and are easier to scrape (like yahoo finance).
Upvotes: 1