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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T16:51:37+00:00

This is not the first time I’ve encountered a problem while using htmlParse in

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This is not the first time I’ve encountered a problem while using htmlParse in the XML library, but in the past I’ve just given up and used a to parse what I needed instead. I’d rather do it via parsing the XML/XHTML, since as we all know regexs aren’t parsers.

That said, I find the error messages from the parse commands to be non-helpful at best, and I have no idea how to proceed. For instance:

> htmlParse(getForm("http://www.takecarehealth.com/LocationSearchResults.aspx", location_query="Deer Park",location_distance=50))
Error in htmlParse(getForm("http://www.takecarehealth.com/LocationSearchResults.aspx",  : 
  File 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head id="ctl00_Head1">
        <title></title>
        <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
            var s_pageName = document.title;
            var s_channel = "Take Care";
            var s_campaign = "";
            var s_eVar1 = ""
            var s_eVar2 = ""
            var s_eVar22 = ""
            var s_eVar23 = ""
        </script>
        <meta name="keywords" content="take care clinic, walgreens clinic, walgreens take care clinic, take care health, urgent care clinic, walk in clinic" />
        <meta name="description" content="Information about simple, quality healthcare for the whole family from Take Care Clinics at select Walgreens, including Take Care Clinic hours, providers, offers, insurance and quality of care." />
        <link rel="shortcut icon" hre

I’m glad it sees something in there, but where do I drill down past “Error: File”?

Note this is, as far as I can tell, well-formed XHTML. When I visit the link manually I can run xpaths on it and Firebug does not complain.

How do I debug errors from htmlParse like this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Downloading first then passing to XML package seems to work

    test<-getForm("http://www.takecarehealth.com/LocationSearchResults.aspx", location_query="Deer Park",location_distance=50)
htmlParse(test,asText=T)

    or directly

    htmlParse(getForm("http://www.takecarehealth.com/LocationSearchResults.aspx", location_query="Deer Park",location_distance=50),asText=T)

    also seems fine

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