# Hassle-free HTML tables with htmltab

#### 2021-09-16

HTML tables are a standard way to display tabular information online. Getting HTML table data into R is fairly straightforward with the readHTMLTable() function of the XML package. But tables on the web are primarily designed for displaying and consuming data, not for analytical purposes. Peculiar design choices for HTML tables are therefore frequently made which tend to produce useless outputs when run through readHTMLTable(). I found that sometimes these outputs could be saved with a little bit of (tedious) post-processing, but just as often they could not. To make working with HTML tables easier and less time-consuming, I developed htmltab, a package for the R system that tries to alleviate these problems directly in the parsing stage when the structural information is still available. Its main advantages over readHTMLTable() are twofold:

• Consideration of row and column spans in the HTML table body and header cells
• More control over the process that translates HTML cells into R table cells

This vignette discusses the application of htmltab for two use cases where the package provides a significant improvement over readHTMLTable().

(I make use of the R packages tidyr and stringr to process table outputs. Neither of the three is required for running htmltab.)

## How to read HTML tables with htmltab()

The principal function of htmltab is htmltab(). The behavior of htmltab() is modeled closely after readHTMLTable(), and many argument names are identical. Any function call requires passing a value to its doc argument. This value may be of three kinds:

1. a URL or file path for the HTML document where the table lives
2. a parsed HTML object of the entire page of class HTMLInternalDocument
3. a table nodeset of class XMLNodeSet

The last of these methods returns a single R table object. For the first two, htmltab() requires users to be specific about the table they would like to have returned. This is done via the which argument. This may be either a numeric value for the table’s position in the page, or a character value that describes an XPath statement.

## 1. Corrections for rowspans and colspans by default

In many HTML tables, spans are used to allow cell values to extend across multiple cells. htmltab() recognizes spans and expands tables automatically. To illustrate this feature, take a look at the HTML table in the Language section of this Wikipedia page about Languages in the UK. The header information spans across three consecutive rows. To get the table into R, we have to pass an identifying information to the which argument. I use an XPath statement that I wrote while exploring the HTML page with Web Developer Tools. One that works is “//th[text() = ‘Ability’]/ancestor::table”:

library(htmltab)

url <- "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Languages_of_the_United_Kingdom&oldid=1005083039"
ukLang <- htmltab(doc = url, which = "//th[text() = 'Ability\n']/ancestor::table")
head(ukLang)
##                                         Ability Wales >> Welsh >> Number
## 4 Understands but does not speak, read or write                  157,792
## 5                      Speaks, reads and writes                  430,717
## 6             Speaks but does not read or write                   80,429
## 7           Speaks and reads but does not write                   45,524
## 8             Reads but does not speak or write                   44,327
## 9                   Other combination of skills                   40,692
##   Wales >> Welsh >> % Scotland >> Scottish Gaelic >> Number
## 4               5.15%                                23,357
## 5              14.06%                                32,191
## 6               2.63%                                18,966
## 7               1.49%                                 6,218
## 8               1.45%                                 4,646
## 9               1.33%                                 1,678
##   Scotland >> Scottish Gaelic >> % Scotland >> Scots >> Number
## 4                            0.46%                     267,412
## 5                            0.63%                   1,225,622
## 6                            0.37%                     179,295
## 7                            0.12%                     132,709
## 8                            0.09%                     107,025
## 9                            0.03%                      17,381
##   Scotland >> Scots >> % Northern Ireland >> Irish >> Number
## 4                  5.22%                              70,501
## 5                 23.95%                              71,996
## 6                  3.50%                              24,677
## 7                  2.59%                               7,414
## 8                  2.09%                               5,659
## 9                  0.34%                               4,651
##   Northern Ireland >> Irish >> % Northern Ireland >> Ulster-Scots >> Number
## 4                          4.06%                                     92,040
## 5                          4.15%                                     17,228
## 6                          1.42%                                     10,265
## 7                          0.43%                                      7,801
## 8                          0.33%                                     11,911
## 9                          0.27%                                        959
##   Northern Ireland >> Ulster-Scots >> %
## 4                                 5.30%
## 5                                 0.99%
## 6                                 0.59%
## 7                                 0.45%
## 8                                 0.69%
## 9                                 0.06%

The header information has been recast into a format that respects the hierarchical order of the variables and yet only spans a single line in the R table. If you prefer a different separator between variables, pass it to the headerSep argument. This format was chosen to make further processing of the table easy. For example, using functionality from the tidyr package, the next couple of data cleaning steps may be the following:

library(tidyr)

ukLang <- gather(ukLang, key, value, -Ability)

This statement restructures the variables in a more useful long format. From this we can separate the variables using an appropriate regular expression such as " >> ".

ukLang <- separate(ukLang, key, into = c("region", "language", "statistic"), sep = " >> ")
head(ukLang)
##                                         Ability region language statistic
## 1 Understands but does not speak, read or write  Wales    Welsh    Number
## 2                      Speaks, reads and writes  Wales    Welsh    Number
## 3             Speaks but does not read or write  Wales    Welsh    Number
## 4           Speaks and reads but does not write  Wales    Welsh    Number
## 5             Reads but does not speak or write  Wales    Welsh    Number
## 6                   Other combination of skills  Wales    Welsh    Number
##     value
## 1 157,792
## 2 430,717
## 3  80,429
## 4  45,524
## 5  44,327
## 6  40,692

htmltab() also automatically expands row and column spans when they appear in the table’s body.

## 2. More control over cell value conversion

htmltab() offers you more control over what part of the HTML table is used in the R table. You can exert this control via htmltab()’s body, header, bodyFun, headerFun, rm_escape, rm_footnotes, rm_nodata_cols, rm_nodata_rows, rm_invisible and rm_whitespace arguments.

### body and header arguments

It is not possible for htmltab() to correctly identify header and body elements in all the tables. Although there is a semantically correct way to organize header and body elements in HTML tables, web designers do not necessarily need to adhere to them to produce visually appealing tables. htmltab employs heuristics for identification but they are no guarantee. If you find that the table is not correctly assembled, you can try to give the function more information through its header and body arguments. These arguments are used to pass information about which rows should be used for the construction of the header and the body. Both accept numeric values for the rows, but a more robust way is to use an XPath that identifies the respective rows. To illustrate, take a look at this Wikipedia page about the New Zealand General Election in 2002. The table uses cells that span the entire column range to classify General and Maori electorates (yellow background). We need to control for this problem explicitly in the assembling stage. I pass the XPath //tr[./td[not(@colspan = '10')]] to the body argument to explicitly discard all rows from the body that have a <td\> cell with a colspan attribute of 10:

url <- "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2002_New_Zealand_general_election&oldid=1044552282"
xp <- "//caption[starts-with(text(), 'Electorate results')]/ancestor::table"
body_xp <- "//tr[./td[not(@colspan = '8')]]"

nz1 <- htmltab(doc = url, which = xp, body = body_xp, encoding = "UTF-8")
## Warning: Columns [Incumbent >> Incumbent,Runner up >> Runner-up] seem to have no
## data and are removed. Use rm_nodata_cols = F to suppress this behavior.
head(nz1)
##   Electorate >> Electorate Incumbent >> Incumbent Winner >> Winner
## 2                   Aoraki             Jim Sutton       Jim Sutton
## 3         Auckland Central          Judith Tizard    Judith Tizard
## 4          Banks Peninsula             Ruth Dyson       Ruth Dyson
## 5            Bay of Plenty             Tony Ryall       Tony Ryall
## 6     Christchurch Central            Tim Barnett      Tim Barnett
## 7        Christchurch East         Lianne Dalziel   Lianne Dalziel
##   Winner >> Winner.1 Majority >> Majority Runner up >> Runner-up
## 2         Jim Sutton                6,453         Wayne Marriott
## 3      Judith Tizard                5,205             Pansy Wong
## 4         Ruth Dyson                4,057           David Carter
## 5         Tony Ryall                5,597            Peter Brown
## 6        Tim Barnett               10,353           Nicky Wagner
## 7     Lianne Dalziel               14,864       Stephen Johnston

### Using table information that intercept body rows

In the previous example, we discarded the two intercepting rows in the body which signified the region of the electorate. You might object that ideally these rows should not be discarded, but used for what they are – variable/header information! As of version 0.6.0, htmltab can process these sort of table designs more efficiently and prepend the information accurately in a new column variable. Information to the header argument can now be passed in the form of X1 + X2 + X3 + …, where X1 codifies the main header (i.e. the one that spans the body grid), and X2, X3, … signify groups of header information that appear in the body. Please note that the in-body information (X2, X3, …) must not identify row elements (tr) but individual cells (td or th) from which the value of the new variable can be generated (usually from the node value). To illustrate, consider the following snippet:

nz2 <- htmltab(doc = url, which = xp, header = 1 + "//tr/td[@colspan = '8']",
body = "//tr[./td[not(@colspan = '10')]]", encoding = "UTF-8")
## Warning: Columns [Header_1,Incumbent,Runner up] seem to have no data and are
## removed. Use rm_nodata_cols = F to suppress this behavior.

Here, we pass ‘1’ to signify that the main header information appear in the first row. We add to this the XPath “//td[@colspan = '10']” that refer to the two rows. Generally, you are free to use numeric information or XPath to refer to the values that are takes as header variable. htmltab extracts these information and prepends them to the main table.

tail(nz2, 9)
##            Electorate          Incumbent             Winner           Winner.1
## 63             Wigram       Jim Anderton               <NA>       Jim Anderton
## 64 MÄ\201ori electorates MÄ\201ori electorates MÄ\201ori electorates MÄ\201ori electorates
## 66    Ikaroa-RÄ\201whiti   Parekura Horomia   Parekura Horomia   Parekura Horomia
## 67             Tainui     New electorate               <NA>      Nanaia Mahuta
## 68   TÄ\201maki Makaurau     New electorate               <NA>      John Tamihere
## 69    Te Tai HauÄ\201uru      Nanaia Mahuta               <NA>      Tariana Turia
## 70     Te Tai Tokerau      Dover Samuels      Dover Samuels      Dover Samuels
## 71       Te Tai Tonga      Mahara Okeroa      Mahara Okeroa      Mahara Okeroa
## 72           Waiariki       Mita Ririnui       Mita Ririnui       Mita Ririnui
##              Majority             Runner up
## 63              3,176             Mike Mora
## 64 MÄ\201ori electorates    MÄ\201ori electorates
## 66             10,359 Glenis Philip-Barbara
## 67              3,430        Willie Jackson
## 68              9,444         Metiria Turei
## 69              8,657              Ken Mair
## 70              5,336            Mere Mangu
## 71              8,052       Bill Karaitiana
## 72              6,717           Rihi Vercoe

For more information on this feature take a look at this blog post and the Details section of the htmltab function in the package documentation.

### Removal of unneeded information

Many HTML tables include additional information which are of little interest to data analysts such as information encoded in superscript and footnote tags, as well as escape sequences. By default, htmltab() removes information from the first two and replaces all escape sequences by whitespace. You can change this behavior through the rm_superscript, rm_footnotes, rm_escape, rm_nodata_cols, rm_nodata_rows, rm_invisible and rm_whitespace arguments.

## Conclusion

HTML tables are a valuable data source but they frequently violate basic principles of data well-formedness. This is usually for good reason since their primary purpose is to increase readability of tabular information. htmltab’s goal is to reduce the need for users to interfere when working with HTML tables by relying on available structural information as well as making some assumptions about the table’s design. However, you are free to exert more control over the transformation by specifying various function arguments.