[R] Extracting information from webpages

[Itay Furman]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Scott Waichler wrote:

[snip]

> > should I go that route and avoid trying to parse webpages?  I was hoping
> > to learn 
> > how to extract information from webpages in general so I could apply the
> > techniques 
> > for other purposes too.
> > 

>From the Introduction to R Data Import/Export (1.8.1):
	....
	In general, statistical systems like R are not 
	particularly well suited to manipulations of large-scale  
	data. ...

And
	... it can be rewarding to use tools such as `awk' and 
	`perl' to manipulate data before import or after export.
	...

You imply that you wish to learn a general technique, therefore 
I'd vote for a general purpose language. Perl is a good choice.

	HTH
	Itay

--------------------------------------------------------------
itayf at fhcrc.org		Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center