Abstract
In this chapter, we explore approaches to parsing XML content within R and extracting content from the various types of elements in the XML document. The primary approach is to parse an XML document into a hierarchical tree object. We show how the tree representation of an XML document (described in Chapter 2) can be treated as a list in R, which makes it easy to navigate nodes and branches in the XML document. In addition, we demonstrate how to use functions in the XML package that are designed to work with different elements of the tree, e.g., functions for accessing node names, text content, attribute values, namespaces, etc. Subsequent chapters introduce XPath (Chapter 4), a powerful XML technology for locating content in an XML document, and describe more complex strategies for extracting XML content (Chapter 5).
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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Nolan, D., Lang, D.T. (2014). Parsing XML Content. In: XML and Web Technologies for Data Sciences with R. Use R!. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7900-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7900-0_3
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