Use substr with start and stop words, instead of integers - r

Question

I want to extract information from downloaded html-Code. The html-Code is given as a string. The required information is stored inbetween specific html-expressions. For example, if I want to have every headline in the string, I have to search for "H1>" and "/H1>" and the text between these html expressions.
So far, I used substr(), but I had to calculate the position of "H1>" and "/H1>" first.
htmlcode = " some html code <H1>headline</H1> some other code <H1>headline2</H1> "
startposition = c(21,55) # calculated with gregexpr
stopposition = c(28, 63) # calculated with gregexpr
substr(htmlcode, startposition[1], stopposition[1])
substr(htmlcode, startposition[2], stopposition[2])
The output is correct, but to calculate every single start and stopposition is a lot of work. Instead I search for a similar function like substr (), where you can use start and stop words instead of the position. For example like this:
function(htmlcode, startword = "H1>", stopword = "/H1>")

Answer 1

I'd agree that using a package built for html processing is probably the best way to handle the example you give. However, one potential way to sub-string a string based on character values would be to do the following.
Step 1: Define a simple function to return to position of a character in a string, in this example I am only using fixed character strings.
strpos_fixed=function(string,char){
a<-gregexpr(char,string,fixed=T)
b<-a[[1]][1:length(a[[1]])]
return(b)
}
Step 2: Define your new sub-string function using the strpos_fixed() function you just defined
char_substr<-function(string,start,stop){
x<-strpos_fixed(string,start)+nchar(start)
y<-strpos_fixed(string,stop)-1
z<-cbind(x,y)
apply(z,1,function(x){substr(string,x[1],x[2])})
}
Step 3: Test
htmlcode = " some html code <H1>headline</H1> some other code <H1>headline2</H1> "
htmlcode2 = " some html code <H1>baa dee ya</H1> some other code <H1>say do you remember?</H1>"
htmlcode3<- "<x>baa dee ya</x> skdjalhgfjafha <x>dancing in september</x>"
char_substr(htmlcode,"<H1>","</H1>")
char_substr(htmlcode2,"<H1>","</H1>")
char_substr(htmlcode3,"<x>","</x>")

Answer 2

You have two options here. First, use a package that has been developed explicitly for the parsing of HTML structures, e.g., rvest. There are a number of tutorials online.
Second, for edge cases where you may need to extract from strings that are not necessarily well-formatted HTML you should use regular expressions. One of the simpler implementations for this comes from stringr::str_match:
# 1. the parenthesis define regex groups
# 2. ".*?" means any character, non-greedy
# 3. so together we are matching the expression <H1>some text or characters of any length</H1>
str_match(htmlcode, "(<H1>)(.*?)(</H1>)")
This will yield a matrix where the columns are (in order) the fully matched string followed by each independent regex group we specified. You would just want to pull the second group in this case if you want whatever text is between the <H1> tags (3rd column).