I am using RSelenium to download a series of newspaper articles from an online repository. So far, the way I am doing so is using the remDr$screenshot() function but, due to resolution, zooming and framing reasons, I wonder if it is possible to just download the picture as it is presented. The sample code to access a page is the following:
library(RSelenium)
rD1 <- rsDriver(browser = "firefox",port=4567L)
remDr <- rD1[["client"]]
url1<-"http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/DocReader.aspx?"
url2<-"bib=090972_07&pesq=cangaceiro&pasta=ano%20192"
remDr$navigate(paste0(url1,url2))
By looking at the source code of the page, I note that the image is hosted in a cache url cache/2286106490137/I0000051-20Alt=000869Lar=000615LargOri=005060AltOri=007149.JPG (with id DocumentoImg). Is there a way to simply download it from this address, without relying on screenshots?
Yes, you can download the image directly in R like this:
# I have split the url just to make it legible on screen here
url_pt1 <- "http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/cache/2627304510157"
url_pt2 <- "/I0000051-20Alt=001984Lar=001404LargOri=005060AltOri=007149.JPG"
big_url <- paste0(url_pt1, url_pt2)
# Choose local file location to download file
file_to <- "download.jpg"
download.file(big_url, file_to)
#> trying URL 'http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/cache/2627304510157
#> /I0000051-20Alt=001984Lar=001404LargOri=005060AltOri=007149.JPG'
#> Content type 'text/html; charset=utf-8' length 8457 bytes
#> downloaded 8457 bytes