I am working on a data prep tutorial, using data from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/19/upshot/trump-complete-insult-list.html#
None of the text is hard-coded, everything is dynamic and I don't know where to start. I've tried a few things with packages rvest and xml2 but I can't even tell if I'm making progress or not.
I've used copy/paste ang regexes in notepad++ to get a tabular structure like this:
Target | Attack |
---|---|
AAA News | Fake News |
AAA News | Fake News |
AAA News | A total disgrace |
... | ... |
Mr. ZZZ | A real nut job |
but I'd like to show how to do everything programmatically (no copy/paste).
My main question is as follows: is that even possible with reasonable effort? And if so, any clues on how to get started?
PS: I know that this could be a duplicate, I just can't tell of which question since there are totally different approaches out there :\
Here's a programatic approach with RSelenium and rvest:
library(RSelenium)
library(rvest)
library(tidyverse)
driver <- rsDriver(browser="chrome", port=4234L, chromever ="87.0.4280.87")
client <- driver[["client"]]
client$navigate("https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/19/upshot/trump-complete-insult-list.html#")
page.source <- client$getPageSource()[[1]]
#Extract nodes for each letter using XPath
Letters <- read_html(page.source) %>%
html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="mem-wall"]/div[2]/div')
#Extract Entities using CSS
Entities <- map(Letters, ~ html_nodes(.x, css = 'div.g-entity-name') %>%
html_text)
#Extract quotes using CSS
Quotes <- map(Letters, ~ html_nodes(.x, css = 'div.g-twitter-quote-container') %>%
map(html_nodes, css = 'div.g-twitter-quote-c') %>%
map(html_text))
#Bind the entites and quotes together. There are two letters that are blank, so fall back to NA
map2_dfr(Entities, Quotes,
~ map2_dfr(.x, .y,~ {if(length(.x) > 0 & length(.y)){data.frame(Entity = .x, Insult = .y)}else{
data.frame(Entity = NA, Insult = NA)}})) -> Result
#Strip out the quotes
Result %>%
mutate(Insult = str_replace_all(Insult,"(^“)|([ .,!?]?”)","") %>% str_trim) -> Result
#Take a look at the result
Result %>%
slice_sample(n=10)
Entity Insult
1 Mitt Romney failed presidential candidate
2 Hillary Clinton Crooked
3 The “mainstream” media Fake News
4 Democrats on a fishing expedition
5 Pete Ricketts illegal late night coup
6 The “mainstream” media anti-Trump haters
7 The Washington Post do nothing but write bad stories even on very positive achievements
8 Democrats weak
9 Marco Rubio Lightweight
10 The Steele Dossier a Fake Dossier
The xpath was obtained by inspecting the webpage source (F9 in Chrome), hovering over elements until the correct one was highlighted, right clicking, and choosing copy XPath as shown: