I am trying to download the share count from the left SumoMe plugin of this website http://www.r-bloggers.com/erum-2016-first-european-conference-for-the-programming-language-r/
I try to use R code based on rvest package
> library(rvest)
Loading required package: xml2
> url <- 'http://www.r-bloggers.com/erum-2016-first-european-conference-for-the-programming-language-r/'
> read_html(url) %>%
+ html_nodes('.wpusb-counts span')
{xml_nodeset (1)}
[1] <span data-element="total-share"></span>
But have received empty response. The page looks like to start with 0 share-count and then it updates after a few second after you spend time on that website. Can someone could suggest any possible solution to that or advice any package? Is RSelenium a good package for that? I haven't used it before.
It looks like that value is loaded asynchronously by javascript so yes, RSelenium may be your best bet. I ended up using the xpath selector in Firebug to pass that parameter to browser$findElement
library(RSelenium)
browser <- remoteDriver()
browser$open()
browser$navigate('http://www.r-bloggers.com/erum-2016-first-european-conference-for-the-programming-language-r/')
value <- browser$findElement(using = 'xpath', '/html/body/div[5]/div/div[1]/div/span')
print(value$getElementText())
[[1]]
[1] "7"