Introduction: This is a tool that allows one to scrape useful information off HTML webpages using R. SelectorGadget allows one to interactively select and deselect elements of a webpage and then use that selector to scrape them into a usable data format. This was useful when my group found a huge list of clubs / organizations at Carleton and wanted to get them into a csv file; this allowed us to save a bunch of time typing.
Steps:
- Download SelectorGadget from the Chrome Web Store.
- Open the webpage you would like to scrape.
- Click on the SelectorGadget button from the top right.
- Click on the elements you would like to select. Click again on the ones you want to exclude.
5. Copy the generated selector and use R and the library “rvest” to get the text. In the below screenshot, the selector is “h2”.
