[R] Downloading a html table

[David L Carlson]

Copy the table data (leave out the column headings and the total line at the
bottom) into the clipboard. Then

> Dta <- read.delim("clipboard", header=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
> colnames(Dta) <- c("No", "State", "Abbrev", "Population", "Area.km", 
     "PopDensity.km", "Area.mi", "PopDensity.mi")
> rownames(Dta) <- Dta$No
> Dta$No <- NULL
> Dta <- transform(Dta, Area.km=as.numeric(gsub(",", "", Area.km)),
     Area.mi=as.numeric(gsub(",", "", Area.mi)),
     PopDensity.mi=as.numeric(gsub(",", "", PopDensity.mi)))
> Dta <- transform(Dta, Population=Area.km*PopDensity.km)

The last line computes the Population from the Area and Population Density.

----------------------------------------------
David L Carlson
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-4352



> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-
> project.org] On Behalf Of Rolf Turner
> Sent: Monday, October 22, 2012 10:47 PM
> To: David Arnold
> Cc: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] Downloading a html table
> 
> On 23/10/12 16:17, David Arnold wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > A friend of mine would like to use this data with his stats class:
> >
> > http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/populations/usapoptable.htm
> >
> > I can't figure a way of capturing this data due to the mysql commands
> in the
> > source code.
> >
> > Any thoughts?
> 
> Copying and pasting, and then editing the resulting file just a wee bit
> (changing
> the blanks in state names to underscores) gave me a file that was
> readily
> readable by read.table().
> 
> Is the column of state populations really blank?  Or is there something
> funny happening with my web browser?
> 
>      cheers,
> 
>          Rolf Turner
> 
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