R dataframe from XML when values are multiple or missing

Question

This question is similar to a previous question, Import all fields (and subfields) of XML as dataframe, but I want to pull out only a subset of the XML data and want to incl

Answer 1

You can use xmlToList and then plyr to get a dataframe you can use

require(XML)
require(plyr)
xD <- xmlParse(xData)
xL <- xmlToList(xD)
ldply(xL, data.frame)
> ldply(xL, data.frame)
   .id     name buildings.building.type buildings.building.bname
1 city   London                landmark             Tower Bridge
2 city New York                 station            Grand Central
3 city    Paris                landmark             Eiffel Tower
  buildings.building.type.1 buildings.building.bname.1
1                   station                   Waterloo
2                      <NA>                       <NA>
3                  landmark                     Louvre

You can pick what you need from this dataframe

Answer 2

There is a solution xpathSapply but writing the xpath here is a little bit complicated. So, Here I propose a solution using xmlToDataFrame and using some regular expression to get the buildings.

dd <- xmlToDataFrame(doc)
rr <- gsub('landmark',',',dd$buildings)
rr <- gsub('station.*','',rr)
builds <- lapply(strsplit(gsub('station.*','',rr),','),
                 function(x)x[nchar(x)>0])
dd$buildings <- builds

    name            buildings
1   London         Tower Bridge
2 New York                     
3    Paris Eiffel Tower, Louvre

Answer 3

If you're looking to exactly reproduce the desired output you showed in your question, you can convert your XML to a list and then extract the information you want:

xml_list <- xmlToList(xmlParse(xml_data))

First loop through each "building" node and remove those that contain "station":

xml_list <- lapply(xml_list, lapply, function(x) {
  x[!sapply(x, function(y) any(y == "station"))]
})

Then collect data for each city into a data frame

xml_list <- lapply(xml_list, function(x) {
  bldgs <- unlist(x$buildings)
  bldgs <- bldgs[bldgs != "landmark"]
  if(is.null(bldgs)) bldgs <- NA
  data.frame(
    "city" = x$name,
    "landmark" = bldgs,
    stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
})

Then combine information from all cities together:

xml_output <- do.call("rbind", xml_list)
xml_output
           city     landmark
city     London Tower Bridge
city1  New York         <NA>
city.1    Paris Eiffel Tower
city.2    Paris       Louvre

Answer 4

Assuming the XML data is in a file called world.xml read it in and iterate over the cities extracting the city name and the bname of any associated landmarks :

library(XML)
doc <- xmlParse("world.xml", useInternalNodes = TRUE)

do.call(rbind, xpathApply(doc, "/world/city", function(node) {

   city <- xmlValue(node[["name"]])

   xp <- "./buildings/building[./type/text()='landmark']/bname"
   landmark <- xpathSApply(node, xp, xmlValue)
   if (is.null(landmark)) landmark <- NA

   data.frame(city, landmark, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

}))

The result is:

      city     landmark
1   London Tower Bridge
2 New York         <NA>
3    Paris Eiffel Tower
4    Paris       Louvre