2

I'm trying to use the XML2 package to scrape a few tables from ESPN.com. For the sake of example, I'd like to scrape the week 7 fantasy quarterback rankings into R, the URL to which is:

http://www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/16ranksWeek7QB/fantasy-football-week-7-quarterback-rankings

I'm trying to use the "read_html()" function to do this because it is what I am most familiar with. Here is my syntax and its error:

> wk.7.qb.rk = read_html("www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/16ranksWeek7QB/fantasy-football-week-7-rankings-quarterbacks", which = 1)
Error: 'www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/16ranksWeek7QB/fantasy-football-week-7-rankings-quarterbacks' does not exist in current working directory ('C:/Users/Brandon/Documents/Fantasy/Football/Daily').

I've also tried "read_xml()", only to get the same error:

> wk.7.qb.rk = read_xml("www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/16ranksWeek7QB/fantasy-football-week-7-rankings-quarterbacks", which = 1)
Error: 'www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/16ranksWeek7QB/fantasy-football-week-7-rankings-quarterbacks' does not exist in current working directory ('C:/Users/Brandon/Documents/Fantasy/Football/Daily').

Why is R looking for this URL in the working directory? I've tried this function with other URLs and had some success. What is it about this specific URL that makes it look in a different location than it does for others? And, how do I change that?

DataProphets
  • 156
  • 3
  • 17

1 Answers1

3

I got this error while I was running my read_html in a loop to navigate through 20 pages. After the 20th page the loop was still running with no urls and hence it started calling read_html with NAs for the other loop iterations.Hope this helps!

challengeAccepted
  • 31
  • 2