Css selector issue with rvest and NHL statistics

Question

I want to scrape data from hockey-reference.com, specifically from this link:

https://www.hockey-reference.com/leagues/NHL_1991.html

I want the 4th table, called "Team Statistics," and I also want to subtract the first and last rows (but that can be for another time).

Initially, I want to get the scrape working with the 1991 link, but I want to eventually scrape every link from 1991 to 2017.

library(tidyverse)
library(rvest)

stat_urls <- "https://www.hockey-reference.com/leagues/NHL_1991.html"

Right now, I have the 1991 link only, for simplicity. I cannot seem to find the correct css selection, even though I have tried multiple different ones, after a pretty thorough search using the "inspect" source of the actual webpage. I have tried the following css selections:

table#stats.sortable.stats_table.now.sortable
#stats
#all_stats
#all_stats > div.table_outer_container
#stats
#stats > tbody
#div_stats (and all sorts of combos with this one)

None of these work, when used in the following code:

team_stats <- stat_urls %>% 
 read_html() %>%
 html_nodes("#stats") %>% 
 html_table(header = T)

All attempts with "xpath=" also failed. Any help with this would be absolutely phenomenal, and Go Preds!

---

Answer 1

You can try using RSelenium. Saw a similar answer here: Web Scraping Basketball Reference using R.

library(rvest)
library(RSelenium)
startServer() 
remDr<-remoteDriver(browserName = "chrome")
remDr$open()

remDr$navigate("https://www.hockey-reference.com/leagues/NHL_1991.html")
page <- read_html(remDr$getPageSource()[[1]])
table <- html_table(page, fill = TRUE)
table[[28]]

It's a pain to install selenium though and I would try to help with that too but I installed it a while ago so don't really remember. Good luck

---

From the guy who posted the original question:

The above answer worked, but I had to go through Homebrew:

https://brew.sh/

And then I had to use the following code from here:

Using Selenium on Mac Chrome

# download selenium jar
curl -L0 https://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/3.9/selenium- 
server-standalone-3.9.1.jar -o selenium-server-standalone.jar

# install chromedriver
brew install chromedriver

# start chrome driver
brew services start chromedriver                                                                                                                                                                      
#==> Successfully started `chromedriver` 
(label:homebrew.mxcl.chromedriver)

# start selenium server
java -jar selenium-server-standalone.jar                                                                                                                                                                           
#14:38:20.684 INFO - Selenium build info: version: '3.9.1', revision: 
'63f7b50'
#14:38:20.685 INFO - Launching a standalone Selenium Server on port 
4444