Parsing Information from Semistructured Documents
This chapter demonstrates how to construct a parser that is able to transform pure character data into R data structures. As an example one identifies climate data that are offered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service at the United States Department of Agriculture. The chapter focuses on a...
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| Published in: | Automated Data Collection with R: A Practical Guide to Web Scraping and Text Mining pp. 359 - 370 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Book Chapter |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Chichester, UK
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
28.07.2014
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| Subjects: | |
| ISBN: | 111883481X, 9781118834817 |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | This chapter demonstrates how to construct a parser that is able to transform pure character data into R data structures. As an example one identifies climate data that are offered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service at the United States Department of Agriculture. The chapter focuses on a set of text files that can be downloaded from an file transfer protocol (FTP) server. While the download procedure is simple, the files cannot be put into an R data structure directly. The displayed data are structured in a way which is human‐readable but not (yet) understandable by a computer program. The main goal is to describe the structure in a way that a computer can handle them. RCurl provides functionality to access data from FTP servers and stringr offers consistent functions for string processing with R. |
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| ISBN: | 111883481X 9781118834817 |
| DOI: | 10.1002/9781118834732.ch13 |