rvest Files

(to be released as rvest 1.0.0)

New features

• New html_text2() provides a more natural rendering of HTML nodes into text, converting <br> into "\n", and removing non-significant whitespace (#175). By default, it also converts   into regular spaces, which you can suppress with preserve_nbsp = TRUE (#284).

• html_table() has been re-written from scratch to more closely mimic the algorithm that browsers use for parsing tables. This should mean that there are far fewer tables for which it fails to produce some output (#63, [#204], [#215]). The fill argument has been deprecated since it is no longer needed. html_table() now returns a tibble rather than a data frame to be compatible with the rest of the tidyverse (#199). Its performance has been considerably improved (#237). It also gains a na.strings argument to control what values are converted to NA (#107), and a convert argument to control whether to run the conversion (#311).

• New html_form_submit() allows you to submit a form directly, without needing to create a session (#300).

• rvest is now licensed as MIT (#287).

API changes

Since this is the 1.0.0 release, I included a large number of API changes to make rvest more compatible with current tidyverse conventions. Older functions have been deprecated, so existing code will continue to work (albeit with a few new warnings).

• rvest now imports xml2 rather than depending on it. This is cleaner because it avoids attaching all the xml2 functions that you're less likely to use. To reduce the change of breakages, rvest re-exports xml2 functions read_html() and url_absolute(), but your code may now need an explicit library(xml2).

• html_form() now returns an object with class rvest_form (instead of form). Fields within a form now have class rvest_field, instead of a variety of classes that were lacking the rvest_ prefix. All functions for working with forms have a common html_form_ prefix: set_values() became html_form_set(). submit_form() was renamed to session_submit() because it returns a session.

• html_node() and html_nodes() have been superseded in favor of html_element() and html_elements() since they (almost) always return elements, not nodes (#298).

• html_session() is now session() and returns an object of class rvest_session (instead of session). All functions that work with session objects now have a common session_ prefix.

• Long deprecated html(), html_tag(), xml() functions have been removed.

• minimal_html() (which doesn't appear to be used by any other package) has had its arguments flipped to make it more intuitive.

• guess_encoding() has been renamed to html_encoding_guess() to avoid a clash with stringr::guess_encoding() (#209). repair_encoding() has been deprecated because it doesn't appear to work.

• pluck() is no longer exported to avoid a clash with purrr::pluck(); if you need it use purrr::map_chr() and friends instead (#209).

• xml_tag(), xml_node(), and xml_nodes() have been formally deprecated in favor of their html_ equivalents.

Minor improvements and bug fixes

• The "harvesting the web" vignette has been rewritten to focus more on basics rvest, eliminating the screenshots to keep the installed package as svelte as possible. It's also been renamed to vignette("rvest") since it's the vignette that you should read first.

• The SelectorGadget vignette is now a web-only article, https://rvest.tidyverse.org/articles/articles/selectorgadget.html, so we can be more generous with screenshots since they're no longer bundled with every install of the package. Together with the rewrite of the other vignette, this means that rvest is now ~90 Kb instead of ~1.1 Mb.

• All uses of IMDB have been eliminated since the site explicitly prohibits scraping (#195).

• session_submit() errors if form doesn't have a url (#288).

• New session_forward() function to complement session_back(). It now allows you to pick the submission button by position (#156). The ... argument is deprecated; please use config instead.

• html_form_set() can now accept character vectors allowing you to select multiple checkboxes in a set or select multiple values from a multi-<select> (#127, with help from @juba). It also uses dynamic dots so that you can use !!! if you have a list of values (#189).