Importing wikipedia tables in R - r

Question

I regularly extract tables from Wikipedia. Excel's web import does not work properly for wikipedia, as it treats the whole page as a table. In google spreadsheet, I can enter this:
=ImportHtml("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan","table",3)
and this function will download the 3rd table, which lists all the counties of the UP of Michigan, from that page.
Is there something similar in R? or can be created via a user defined function?

Answer 1

Building on Andrie's answer, and addressing SSL. If you can take one additional library dependency:
library(httr)
library(XML)
url <- "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan"
r <- GET(url)
doc <- readHTMLTable(
doc=content(r, "text"))
doc[6]

Answer 2

The function readHTMLTable in package XML is ideal for this.
Try the following:
library(XML)
doc <- readHTMLTable(
doc="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan")
doc[[6]]
V1 V2 V3 V4
1 County Population Land Area (sq mi) Population Density (per sq mi)
2 Alger 9,862 918 10.7
3 Baraga 8,735 904 9.7
4 Chippewa 38,413 1561 24.7
5 Delta 38,520 1170 32.9
6 Dickinson 27,427 766 35.8
7 Gogebic 17,370 1102 15.8
8 Houghton 36,016 1012 35.6
9 Iron 13,138 1166 11.3
10 Keweenaw 2,301 541 4.3
11 Luce 7,024 903 7.8
12 Mackinac 11,943 1022 11.7
13 Marquette 64,634 1821 35.5
14 Menominee 25,109 1043 24.3
15 Ontonagon 7,818 1312 6.0
16 Schoolcraft 8,903 1178 7.6
17 TOTAL 317,258 16,420 19.3
readHTMLTable returns a list of data.frames for each element of the HTML page. You can use names to get information about each element:
> names(doc)
[1] "NULL"
[2] "toc"
[3] "Election results of the 2008 Presidential Election by County in the Upper Peninsula"
[4] "NULL"
[5] "Cities and Villages of the Upper Peninsula"
[6] "Upper Peninsula Land Area and Population Density by County"
[7] "19th Century Population by Census Year of the Upper Peninsula by County"
[8] "20th & 21st Centuries Population by Census Year of the Upper Peninsula by County"
[9] "NULL"
[10] "NULL"
[11] "NULL"
[12] "NULL"
[13] "NULL"
[14] "NULL"
[15] "NULL"
[16] "NULL"

Answer 3

Here is a solution that works with the secure (https) link:
install.packages("htmltab")
library(htmltab)
htmltab("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan",3)

Answer 4

One simple way to do it is to use the RGoogleDocs interface to have Google Docs to do the conversion for you:
http://www.omegahat.org/RGoogleDocs/run.html
You can then use the =ImportHtml Google Docs function with all its pre-built magic.

Answer 5

A tidyverse solution using rvest. It's very useful if you need to find the table based on some keywords, for example in the table headers. Here is an example where we want to get the table on Vital statistics of Egypt. Note: html_nodes(x = page, css = "table") is a useful way to browse available tables on the page.
library(magrittr)
library(rvest)
# define the page to load
read_html("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt") %>%
# list all tables on the page
html_nodes(css = "table") %>%
# select the one containing needed key words
extract2(., str_which(string = . , pattern = "Live births")) %>%
# convert to a table
html_table(fill = T) %>%
view

Answer 6

That table is the only table which is a child of the second td child of so you can specify that pattern with css. Rather than use a type selector of table to grab the child table you can use the class which is faster:
library(rvest)
t <- read_html('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan') %>%
html_node('td:nth-child(2) .wikitable') %>%
html_table()
print(t)