How to get table data from html table in xml?

Question

I have one xml file which has some html content like bold, paragraph and tables. I have written shell script to parse all html tags except tables. I'm using XML (R package) to parse the data.

<Root>
    <Title> This is dummy xml file </Title>
    <Content> This table summarises data in BMC format.
        <div class="abctable">
            <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"   class="coder">
                <tbody>
                    <tr>
                        <th width="50%">ABC</th>
                        <th width="50%">Weight status</th>
                    </tr>
                    <tr>
                        <td>are 18.5</td>
                        <td>arew</td>
                    </tr>
                    <tr>
                        <td>18.5 &amp;mdash; 24.9</td>
                        <td>rweq</td>
                    </tr>
                    <tr>
                        <td>25.0 &amp;mdash; 29.9</td>
                        <td>qewrte</td>
                    </tr>
                    <tr>
                        <td>30.0 and hwerqer</td>
                        <td>rwqe</td>
                    </tr>
                    <tr>
                        <td>40.0 rweq rweq</td>
                        <td>rqwe reqw</td>
                    </tr>
                </tbody>
            </table>
        </div>
    </Content>
    <Section>blah blah blah</Section>
</Root>

How to parse the content of this table which in present in xml?

juba · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-25 10:22:25Z

2

Well there is a function called readHTMLTable in the XML package, that seems to do just what you need ?

Here is a way to do it with the following xml file :

<Root>
    <Title> This is dummy xml file </Title>
    <Content>
      This table summarises data in BMC format.

     <div class="abctable">
     <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"   class="coder">
   <tbody>
   <tr>
       <th width="50%">ABC</th><th width="50%">Weight status</th>
   </tr>
   <tr>
       <td>are 18.5</td>
       <td>arew</td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
       <td>18.5 &amp;mdash; 24.9</td>
       <td>rweq</td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
       <td>25.0 &amp;mdash; 29.9</td>
       <td>qewrte</td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
       <td>30.0 and hwerqer</td>
       <td>rwqe</td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
       <td>40.0 rweq rweq</td>
       <td>rqwe reqw</td>
   </tr>
   </tbody>
  </table>
   </Content>
 </div>
 <Section>blah blah blah</Section>
 </Root>

If this is saved in a file called /tmp/data.xml then you can use the following code :

doc <- htmlParse("/tmp/data.xml")
tableNodes <- getNodeSet(doc, "//table")
tb <- readHTMLTable(tableNodes[[1]])

Which fives :

R> tb
                 V1            V2
1               ABC Weight status
2          are 18.5          arew
3 18.5 &mdash; 24.9          rweq
4 25.0 &mdash; 29.9        qewrte
5  30.0 and hwerqer          rwqe
6    40.0 rweq rweq     rqwe reqw

edited Jan 25, 2013 at 10:22

answered Jan 25, 2013 at 8:23

juba

49.3k14 gold badges116 silver badges121 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

5 Comments

juba Over a year ago

If look at the command help page and its examples (?readHTMLTable), it seems that you just have to parse your XML, then select one <table> element and use readHTMLTable on it to get the values. All of this is done with functions of the XML package.

Manish Over a year ago

I made an attmpt to parse the above xml file (data.xml) : doc = xmlTreeParse("data.xml", useInternal = TRUE, encoding="UTF-8") top = xmlRoot(doc) table<-top[[2]] readHTMLTable[table] but i get error message: Error in readHTMLTable[table] : object of type 'closure' is not subsettable

juba Over a year ago

Updated my answer with a working example (almost copy/pasted from the help page, by the way).

Manish Over a year ago

i have uploaded one xml file at textuploader.com/?p=6&id=ZBwog. With this i cannot parse two tables using your code. Can u pls help me where i m wrong.

juba Over a year ago

First, your xml file is not well-formed, most of your tags are converted to entities. Second, please read the help page of readHTMLTable to understand how to parse several tables in a file.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:02:26Z

1

The best method for xml parsing would be to use xpath expressions

Xpath Tutorial

Xpath and R

How to use XPath and R stackoverflow

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:02

CommunityBot

11 silver badge

answered Jan 25, 2013 at 8:16

Billybonks

1,5683 gold badges15 silver badges33 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to get table data from html table in xml?

2 Answers 2

5 Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

5 Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related