Scraping a wiki page for the “Periodic table” and all the links

Question

I wish to scrape the following wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table

So that the output of my R code will be a table with the following columns:

Answer 1

Do you have to scrape Wikipedia? You can run this SPARQL query against Wikidata instead (results):

SELECT
  ?elementLabel
  ?symbol
  ?article
WHERE
{
  ?element wdt:P31 wd:Q11344;
           wdt:P1086 ?n;
           wdt:P246 ?symbol.
  OPTIONAL {
    ?article schema:about ?element;
             schema:inLanguage "en";
             schema:isPartOf .
  }
  FILTER (?n >= 1 && ?n <= 118).
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
ORDER BY ?n

Sorry if this doesn't answer your question directly but this should help people looking to scrape the same information but in a clean manner.