R: convert XML data to data frame

Question

For a homework assignment I am attempting to convert an XML file into a data frame in R. I have tried many different things, and I have searched for ideas on the internet bu

Answer 1

It may not be as verbose as the XML package but xml2 doesn't have the memory leaks and is laser-focused on data extraction. I use trimws which is a really recent addition to R core.

library(xml2)

pg <- read_xml("http://www.ggobi.org/book/data/olive.xml")

# get all the s
recs <- xml_find_all(pg, "//record")

# extract and clean all the columns
vals <- trimws(xml_text(recs))

# extract and clean (if needed) the area names
labs <- trimws(xml_attr(recs, "label"))

# mine the column names from the two variable descriptions
# this XPath construct lets us grab either the  or  tags
# and then grabs the 'name' attribute of them
cols <- xml_attr(xml_find_all(pg, "//data/variables/*[self::categoricalvariable or
                                                      self::realvariable]"), "name")

# this converts each set of  columns to a data frame
# after first converting each row to numeric and assigning
# names to each column (making it easier to do the matrix to data frame conv)
dat <- do.call(rbind, lapply(strsplit(vals, "\ +"),
                                 function(x) {
                                   data.frame(rbind(setNames(as.numeric(x),cols)))
                                 }))

# then assign the area name column to the data frame
dat$area_name <- labs

head(dat)
##   region area palmitic palmitoleic stearic oleic linoleic linolenic
## 1      1    1     1075          75     226  7823      672        NA
## 2      1    1     1088          73     224  7709      781        31
## 3      1    1      911          54     246  8113      549        31
## 4      1    1      966          57     240  7952      619        50
## 5      1    1     1051          67     259  7771      672        50
## 6      1    1      911          49     268  7924      678        51
##   arachidic eicosenoic    area_name
## 1        60         29 North-Apulia
## 2        61         29 North-Apulia
## 3        63         29 North-Apulia
## 4        78         35 North-Apulia
## 5        80         46 North-Apulia
## 6        70         44 North-Apulia

UPDATE

I'd prbly do the last bit this way now:

library(tidyverse)

strsplit(vals, "[[:space:]]+") %>% 
  map_df(~as_data_frame(as.list(setNames(., cols)))) %>% 
  mutate(area_name=labs)