I am scraping data from a web page using XML (excellent package BTW - that's scraping data the easy way!).

So far, I've got the code:

tables <- readHTMLTable(theurl)
rhf <- tables$tabResHistFull
div1 <- rhf[which(rhf$V1=="Div ps"),]
div1

which is giving me the result:
       V1 V2    V3    V4    V5    V6    V7          V8    V9   V10   V11   V12   V13   V14  V15
15 Div ps  p 32.31 35.64 40.17 42.55 45.13 46.36+17.22 51.11 55.72 70.78 71.72 76.99 82.20 <NA>

I don't know a priori how many columns are in the table.

I want to be able to extract the numbers to the best of my ability, and check to see if they form a monotonic sequence.


How do I do this?

If I type:
   div2 <- div1[is.numeric(div1)]
   div2
I get
   data frame with 0 columns and 1 rows

OTOH, if I type
   div2 <- as.numeric(div1)
   div2
I get
   [1]  9  4 15 16 18 20 17 21 21 18 24 24  8  8 NA
Huh??

What do I need to do? The data in V8 in this particular instance is aberrational - I don't care how it gets treated; although I really want the number 46.36 out of it. Any sane solution will do, though.
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