Scrape website data using rvest - css

Question

I am trying to scrape the data corresponding to Table 5 from the following link: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/5tabledatadecpdf/table_5_crime_in_the_united_states_by_state_2013.xls
As suggested, I used SelectorGadget to find the relevant CSS match, and the one I found that contained all the data (as well as some extraneous information) was "#page_content"
I've tried the following code, which yield errors:
fbi <- read_html("https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/5tabledatadecpdf/table_5_crime_in_the_united_states_by_state_2013.xls")
fbi %>%
html_node("#page_content") %>%
html_table()
Error: html_name(x) == "table" is not TRUE
#Try extracting only the first column:
fbi %>%
html_nodes(".group0") %>%
html_table()
Error: html_name(x) == "table" is not TRUE
#Directly feed fbi into html_table
data = fbi %>% html_table(fill = T)
#This output creates a list of 3 elements, where within list 1 and 3, there are many missing values.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can download the excel file directly. After that you should look into the excel file and take data that you want into a csv file. After that you can work on the data. Below is the code for doing the same.
library(rvest)
library(stringr)
page <- read_html("https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/5tabledatadecpdf/table_5_crime_in_the_united_states_by_state_2013.xls")
pageAdd <- page %>%
html_nodes("a") %>% # find all links
html_attr("href") %>% # get the url
str_subset("\\.xls") %>% # find those that end in xls
.[[1]]
mydestfile <- "D:/Kumar/table5.xls" # change the path and file name as per your system
download.file(pageAdd, mydestfile, mode="wb")
The data is not in a very formatted way. Hence downloading it in R, will be more confusing. To me this appears to be the best way to solve your problem.