HTML tables are a valuable data source but extracting and recasting these data into a useful format can be tedious. htmltab is a package for extracting structured information from HTML tables. It is similar to readHTMLTable() of the XML package but provides two major advantages. First, the function automatically expands row and column spans in the header and body cells. Second, users are given more control over the identification of header and body rows which will end up in the R table. Additionally, the function preprocesses table code, removes unneeded parts and so helps to alleviate the need for tedious post-processing.
The package is available from CRAN and Github. For the stable release version, download from CRAN:
install.packages("htmltab")
For the developer version, download from my GitHub repo. You can install the package directly from inside R:
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("crubba/htmltab")
To see htmltab in action, take a look at the case studies in the package vignette, this blog post or consult the package manual.
If you experience problems with htmltab, I would like to hear about it to improve the project. Please use my github repo to report the issue.