Scraping XML Tables with R

A couple of my good friends also recently started a sports analytics blog. We’ve decided to collaborate on a couple of studies revolving around NBA data found at www.basketball-reference.com. This will be the first part of that project!

Data scientists need data. The internet has lots of data. How can I get that data into R? Scrape it!

People have been scraping websites for as long as there have been websites. It’s gotten pretty easy using R/Python/whatever other tool you want to use. This post shows how to use R to scrape the demographic information for all NBA and ABA players listed at www.basketball-reference.com.

Here’s the code:

###### Settings

library(XML)

 ###### URLs

url<-paste0("http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/",letters,"/")

len<-length(url)

 ###### Reading data

tbl<-readHTMLTable(url[1])[[1]]

 for (i in 2:len)

    {tbl<-rbind(tbl,readHTMLTable(url[i])[[1]])}

 ###### Formatting data

colnames(tbl)<-c("Name","StartYear","EndYear","Position","Height","Weight","BirthDate","College")

tbl$BirthDate<-as.Date(tbl$BirthDate[1],format="%B %d, %Y")

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

And here’s the result:Result

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/scraping-xml-tables-with-r/