I’m pleased to announce rvest 0.3.0 is now available on CRAN. Rvest makes it easy to scrape (or harvest) data from html web pages, inspired by libraries like beautiful soup . It is designed to work with pipes so that you can express complex operations by composed simple pieces. Install it with:

1

install.packages("rvest")

What’s new#

The biggest change in this version is that rvest now uses the xml2 package instead of XML . This makes rvest much simpler, eliminates memory leaks, and should improve performance a little.

A number of functions have changed names to improve consistency with other packages: most importantly html() is now read_html(), and html_tag() is now html_name(). The old versions still work, but are deprecated and will be removed in rvest 0.4.0.

html_node() now throws an error if there are no matches, and a warning if there’s more than one match. I think this should make it more likely to fail clearly when the structure of the page changes. If you don’t want this behaviour, use html_nodes().

There were a number of other bug fixes and minor improvements as described in the release notes .