I'm trying to scrape a table from a web page that has multiple tables. I'd like to get the "FIPS Codes for the States and the District of Columbia" table from https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ansi_statetables.html . I think the XML::readHTMLTable() is the right way to go, but when I try the following I get an error:
url = "https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ansi_statetables.html"
readHTMLTable(url, header = T, stringsAsFactors = F)
named list() Warning message: XML content does not seem to be XML: 'https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ansi_statetables.html'
This is not surprising, of course, because I'm not giving the function any indication of which table I'd like to read. I've dug around in "Inspect" for quite a while but I'm not connecting dots on how to be more precise. There doesn't seem to be a name or class of the table that is analogous to other examples I've found in documentation or on SO. Thoughts?
Consider using readLines() to scrape the html page content and use result in readHTMLTable():
url = "https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ansi_statetables.html"
webpage <- readLines(url)
readHTMLTable(webpage, header = T, stringsAsFactors = F) # LIST OF 3 TABLES
# $`NULL`
# Name FIPS State Numeric Code Official USPS Code
# 1 Alabama 01 AL
# 2 Alaska 02 AK
# 3 Arizona 04 AZ
# 4 Arkansas 05 AR
# 5 California 06 CA
# 6 Colorado 08 CO
# 7 Connecticut 09 CT
# 8 Delaware 10 DE
# 9 District of Columbia 11 DC
# 10 Florida 12 FL
# 11 Georgia 13 GA
# 12 Hawaii 15 HI
# 13 Idaho 16 ID
# 14 Illinois 17 IL
# ...
For specific dataframe return:
fipsdf <- readHTMLTable(webpage, header = T, stringsAsFactors = F)[[1]]