How to get rvest or sapply to skip NA values? - r

Question

I am using rvest to (try to) scrape all the author affiliation data from a database of academic publications called RePEc. I have the authors' short IDs (author_reg), which I'm using to scrape affiliation data. However, I have several columns indicating multiple authors (each of which I need the affiliation data for). When there aren't multiple authors, the cell has an NA value. Some of the columns are mostly NA values so how do I alter my code so it skips the NA values but doesn't delete them?
Here is the code I'm using:
library(rvest)
library(purrr)
df$author_reg <- c("paa6","paa2","paa1", "paa8", "pve266", "pya500", "NA", "NA")
http1 <- "https://ideas.repec.org/e/"
http2 <- "https://ideas.repec.org/f/"
df$affiliation_author_1 <- sapply(df$author_reg_1, function(x) {
links = c(paste0(http1, x, ".html"),paste0(http2, x, ".html"))
# here we try both links and store under attempts
attempts = links %>% map(function(i){
try(read_html(i) %>% html_nodes("#affiliation h3") %>% html_text())
})
# the good ones will have "character" class, the failed ones, try-error
gdlink = which(sapply(attempts,class) != "try-error")
if(length(gdlink)>0){
return(attempts[[gdlink[1]]])
}
else{
return("True 404 error")
}
})
Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

As far as I see the target links, you can try the following way. First, you want to scrape all links from https://ideas.repec.org/e/ and create all links. Then, check if each link exists or not. (There are about 26000 links with this URL, and I do not have time to check all. So I just used 100 URLs in the following demonstration.) Extract all existing links.
library(rvest)
library(httr)
library(tidyverse)
# Get all possible links from this webpage. There are 26665 links.
read_html("https://ideas.repec.org/e/") %>%
html_nodes("td") %>%
html_nodes("a") %>%
html_attr("href") %>%
.[grepl(x = ., pattern = "html")] -> x
# Create complete URLs.
mylinks1 <- paste("https://ideas.repec.org/e/", x, sep = "")
# For this demonstration I created a subset.
mylinks_samples <- mylinks1[1:100]
# Check if each URL exists or not. If FALSE, a link exists.
foo <- sapply(mylinks_sample, http_error)
# Using the logical vector, foo, extract existing links.
urls <- mylinks_samples[!foo]
Then, for each link, I tried to extract affiliation information. There are several spots with h3. So I tried to specifically target h3 that stays in xpath containing id = "affiliation". If there is no affiliation information, R returns character(0). When enframe() is applied, these elements are removed. For instance, pab127 does not have any affiliation information, so there is no entry for this link.
lapply(urls, function(x){
read_html(x, encoding = "UTF-8") %>%
html_nodes(xpath = '//*[#id="affiliation"]') %>%
html_nodes("h3") %>%
html_text() %>%
trimws() -> foo
return(foo)}) -> mylist
Then, I assigned names to mylist with the links and created a data frame.
names(mylist) <- sub(x = basename(urls), pattern = ".html", replacement = "")
enframe(mylist) %>%
unnest(value)
name value
<chr> <chr>
1 paa1 "(80%) Institutt for ØkonomiUniversitetet i Bergen"
2 paa1 "(20%) Gruppe for trygdeøkonomiInstitutt for ØkonomiUniversitetet i Bergen"
3 paa2 "Department of EconomicsCollege of BusinessUniversity of Wyoming"
4 paa6 "Statistisk SentralbyråGovernment of Norway"
5 paa8 "Centraal Planbureau (CPB)Government of the Netherlands"
6 paa9 "(79%) Economic StudiesBrookings Institution"
7 paa9 "(21%) Brookings Institution"
8 paa10 "Helseøkonomisk Forskningsprogram (HERO) (Health Economics Research Programme)\nUniversitetet i Oslo (Unive~
9 paa10 "Institutt for Helseledelse og Helseökonomi (Institute of Health Management and Health Economics)\nUniversi~
10 paa11 "\"Carlo F. Dondena\" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA)\nUniversità Commerciale Luigi Boccon~