Scraping Website In R

I am trying to scrape the name, city, state, email, etc of professionals from this website http://www.napo.net/search/newsearch.asp using rvest, but I can't seem to get the CSS sel

Solution 1:

This solution uses seleniumPipes and RSelenium package. You should also download phantomjs ,unzip it and put .exe file in in your R working directory.
This method uses a headless browser(phantomjs) which simulates user behavior. It can read javascript generated values.

library(rvest)
library(RSelenium) # start a server with utility function
library(seleniumPipes)
rD <- rsDriver (browser = 'chrome',chromever = "latest",port = 4444L)
#open browser
remDr <- remoteDr(browserName = "chrome")

main_page_url <- "http://www.napo.net/search/newsearch.asp"
#go to home page
remDr %>% go(main_page_url)
#switch to iframe
remDr %>% switchToFrame(Id = "SearchResultsFrame")
#get all relative path
relative_path <- remDr %>% getPageSource() %>% html_nodes(".lineitem a[href]") %>% html_attr("href")
#all individual urls:
full_paths <- paste0("http://www.napo.net",relative_path)
#scrape email from each page
email_address <- list()
#Retrieve email adress from the first three results
for(i in seq_along(full_paths[1:3])){
    remDr %>% go(full_paths[i])
    email_adress <- remDr %>% getPageSource()  %>% html_nodes('a[href^="mailto"]') %>% html_text()
    temp_list <- list(email = email_adress)
    email_address <- c(email_address,temp_list)
    Sys.sleep(3)
}
#display result
email_address[1]
    $email
[1] "marla@123organize.com"

Above are all for page one, if you want to turn to page two:

remDr %>% go(main_page_url)
remDr %>% switchToFrame(Id = "SearchResultsFrame")
#click on page two on iframe to turn to page 2:
remDr %>% findElement(using = "css selector",value = ".DotNetPager a:nth-child(2)") %>% elementClick()
#get relative and full path again
relative_path <- remDr %>% getPageSource() %>% html_nodes(".lineitem a[href]") %>% html_attr("href")
full_paths <- paste0("http://www.napo.net",relative_path)
#And you can do the for loop again
for(i in seq_along(full_paths[1:3])){
    remDr %>% go(full_paths[i])
    email_adress <- remDr %>% getPageSource()  %>% html_nodes('a[href^="mailto"]') %>% html_text()
    temp_list <- list(email = email_adress)
    email_address <- c(email_address,temp_list)
    Sys.sleep(3)
}
#display result[6]
$email
[1] "lynette@itssimplyplaced.com"

email_address
#You can also do a loop to scrape all pages
#-----
#delete session and close server
remDr %>% deleteSession()
rD[["server"]]$stop() 

Solution 2:

I am doing it in 2 steps.

1.to get the link to the embedded search result pages:

require(rvest)
require(magrittr)
yourlink <- "http://www.napo.net/search/newsearch.asp"
linktoresult <- yourlink %>% read_html() %>%
                html_nodes("iframe") %>% extract(1) %>%
                html_attr("src")

# /searchserver/people.aspx?id=FE0436D0-08ED-4763-8588-09112794521D&cdbid=&canconnect=0&canmessage=0&map=True&toggle=False&hhSearchTerms=

2.scrape from the actual search result page:

pagelink <- paste0("http://www.napo.net", linktoresult)
# "http://www.napo.net/searchserver/people.aspx?id=FE0436D0-08ED-4763-8588-09112794521D&cdbid=&canconnect=0&canmessage=0&map=True&toggle=False&hhSearchTerms="

yourresult <- pagelink %>% read_html() %>%
              html_nodes("#SearchResultsGrid>.lineitem") %>%
              html_nodes("a") %>% 
              html_attr("href")
#/members/?id=42241027
#NA
#/members/?id=46636113
#/members/?id=37474237
#/members/?id=39530420
#...