Equivalent of which in scraping?

Question

I\'m trying to run some scraping where the action I take on a node is conditional on the contents of the node.

This should be a minimal example:

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Answer 1

Based on R Conditional evaluation when using the pipe operator %>%, you can do something like

page %>% 
   html_nodes(xpath='//td[@class="id-tag"]') %>% 
   {ifelse(is.na(html_node(.,xpath="span")), 
           html_text(.),
           {html_node(.,xpath="span") %>% html_attr("title")}
   )}

I think it is possibly simple to discard the pipe and save some of the objects created along the way

nodes <- html_nodes(page, xpath='//td[@class="id-tag"]')
text <- html_text(nodes)
title <- html_attr(html_node(nodes,xpath='span'),"title")
value <- ifelse(is.na(html_node(nodes, xpath="span")), text ,title)

An xpath only approach might be

page %>% 
 html_nodes(xpath='//td[@class="id-tag"]/span/@title|//td[@class="id-tag"][not(.//span)]') %>%
 html_text()