Scrape values from HTML select/option tags in R

Question

I\'m trying (fairly unsuccessfully) to scrape some data from a website (www.majidata.co.ke) using R. I\'ve managed to scrape the HTML and parse it but now a little unsure how to

Answer 1

Using xpath expressions with HTML is almost always a better choice than regex. Given this data you can extract what you're after with

options<-getNodeSet(xmlRoot(majidata_html), "//select[@id='town']/option")

ids <- sapply(options, xmlGetAttr, "value")
names <- sapply(options, xmlValue)

data.frame(ID=ids, Name=names)

which returns

   ID          Name
1   0 [SELECT TOWN]
2 611         AHERO
3 635         AKALA
4 625         AWASI
5 628        AWENDO
6 749        BAHATI
...