Question

I’m looking to scrape some Houston Dynamo stats from this season into a CSV and then visualize that data with R.

How can I scrape both the tr and td elements using lxml? Is there an easier selector I should be looking at?

Answer 1

For (reasonably) well formed HTML tables, the XML package in R makes this sort of thing pretty stupidly easy:

library(XML)
> url <- "http://www.houstondynamo.com/stats/season?page=0"
> tbl <- readHTMLTable(url)
> head(tbl[[1]])
           Player POS GP GS MINS  G  A SHTS SOG GWG PKG/A HmG RdG G/90min  SC%
1      Will Bruin   F 32 31 2510 12  4   78  35   0   0/0   6   6    0.43 15.4
2      Brad Davis   M 31 28 2523  8 12   53  22   3   3/4   5   3    0.29 15.1
3     Brian Ching   F 30 13 1385  5  5   35  15   1   2/2   2   3    0.32 14.3
4   Boniek Garcia   M 17 17 1530  4  6   30  12   1   0/0   3   1    0.24 13.3
5      Calen Carr   M 26 17 1512  4  2   29  11   2   0/0   3   1    0.24 13.8
6 Macoumba Kandji   F 29 21 1630  4  2   34  16   1   0/0   3   1    0.22 11.8