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Asked: 2026-06-10T04:10:40+00:00

I try to scrape a website but can’t handle this encoding issue: # putting

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I try to scrape a website but can’t handle this encoding issue:

# putting together the url:
search_str <- "allintitle:amphibian richness OR diversity"
url <- paste("http://scholar.google.at/scholar?q=",
             search_str, "&hl=en&num=100&as_sdt=1,5&as_vis=1", sep = "")

# get content and parse it:
doc <- htmlParse(url)

# encoding isssue, like here..
xpathSApply(doc, '//div[@class="gs_a"]', xmlValue)

  [1] "M Vences, M Thomas… - …  of the Royal  …, 2005 - rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org"             
  [2] "PB Pearman - Conservation Biology, 1997 - Wiley Online Library"                                     
  [3] "D Vallan - Biological Conservation, 2000 - Elsevier"                                                
  [4] "LB Buckley, W Jetz - Proceedings of the Royal  …, 2007 - rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org"         
  [5] "Mà Rodríguez, JA Belmontes, BA Hawkins - Acta Oecologica, 2005 - Elsevier"                        
  [6] "TJC Beebee - Biological Conservation, 1997 - Elsevier"                                              
  [7] "D Vallan - Journal of Tropical Ecology, 2002 - Cambridge Univ Press"                                
  [8] "MO Rödel, R Ernst - Ecotropica, 2004 - gtoe.de" 
# ...

any pointers?

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22)
Platform: x86_64-pc-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=German_Austria.1252  LC_CTYPE=German_Austria.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=German_Austria.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                   
[5] LC_TIME=German_Austria.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] RCurl_1.91-1.1 bitops_1.0-4.1 XML_3.9-4.1   

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_2.15.1

> getOption("encoding")
[1] "native.enc"
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This worked to some degree for me

    doc <- htmlParse(url,encoding="UTF-8")
head(xpathSApply(doc, '//div[@class="gs_a"]', xmlValue))
#[1] "M Vences, M Thomas… - …  of the Royal  …, 2005 - rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org"        
#[2] "PB Pearman - Conservation Biology, 1997 - Wiley Online Library"                          
#[3] "D Vallan - Biological Conservation, 2000 - Elsevier"                                     
#[4] "LB Buckley, W Jetz - Proceedings of the Royal  …, 2007 - rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org"
#[5] "MÁ Rodríguez, JA Belmontes, BA Hawkins - Acta Oecologica, 2005 - Elsevier"               
#[6] "TJC Beebee - Biological Conservation, 1997 - Elsevier"

    thou 

    xpathSApply(doc, '//div[@class="gs_a"]', xmlValue)[[81]]

    was displaying incorrectly on my windows box for example.

    switching to Font DotumChe using GUI preferences however showed it displaying correctly so it may just be a display issue not a parsing one.

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