Why choose between R and Python when you can have both? This tutorial shows how to install a Python scraper and use it for content discovery and text extraction, all straight from R.

The issue with URLs and URIs

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).

Both navigation on the Web and web crawling rely on the assumption that “the Web is a space in which resources are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).” (Berners-Lee et al., 2006) That being said, URLs cannot be expected to be entirely reliable. Especially as part of the Web 2.0 content …

htmldate performs better than the other Python solutions, it is also noticeably faster. Especially for smaller news outlets, websites and blogs, as well as pages written in languages other than English, it greatly extends date extraction coverage without sacrificing precision.

Python packages are compared with respect to robustness and speed. Raw text extraction of boilerplate and content segments reveals which web scraping tool is more adapted to the html2text challenge.