class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide .title[ # Web scraping considerations ] .subtitle[ ## <br><br> Data Science in a Box ] .author[ ### <a href="https://datasciencebox.org/">datasciencebox.org</a> ] --- layout: true <div class="my-footer"> <span> <a href="https://datasciencebox.org" target="_blank">datasciencebox.org</a> </span> </div> --- class: middle # Ethics --- ## "Can you?" vs "Should you?" <img src="img/ok-cupid-1.png" width="60%" style="display: block; margin: auto;" /> .footnote[.small[ Source: Brian Resnick, [Researchers just released profile data on 70,000 OkCupid users without permission](https://www.vox.com/2016/5/12/11666116/70000-okcupid-users-data-release), Vox. ]] --- ## "Can you?" vs "Should you?" <img src="img/ok-cupid-2.png" width="70%" style="display: block; margin: auto;" /> --- class: middle # Challenges --- ## Unreliable formatting at the source <img src="img/unreliable-formatting.png" width="70%" style="display: block; margin: auto;" /> --- ## Data broken into many pages <img src="img/many-pages.png" width="70%" style="display: block; margin: auto;" /> --- class: middle # Workflow --- ## Screen scraping vs. APIs Two different scenarios for web scraping: - Screen scraping: extract data from source code of website, with html parser (easy) or regular expression matching (less easy) - Web APIs (application programming interface): website offers a set of structured http requests that return JSON or XML files --- ## A new R workflow - When working in an R Markdown document, your analysis is re-run each time you knit - If web scraping in an R Markdown document, you'd be re-scraping the data each time you knit, which is undesirable (and not *nice*)! - An alternative workflow: - Use an R script to save your code - Saving interim data scraped using the code in the script as CSV or RDS files - Use the saved data in your analysis in your R Markdown document