R: Using rvest package instead of XML package to get links from URL

Question

I use XML package to get the links from this url.

# Parse HTML URL
v1WebParse <- htmlParse(v1URL)
# Read links and and get the quotes of the companies from the href
t1Links <- data.frame(xpathSApply(v1WebParse, '//a', xmlGetAttr, 'href'))

While this method is very efficient, I've used rvest and seems faster at parsing a web than XML. I tried html_nodes and html_attrs but I can't get it to work.

Answer 1

Despite my comment, here's how you can do it with rvest. Note that we need to read in the page with htmlParse first since the site has the content-type set to text/plain for that file and that tosses rvest into a tizzy.

library(rvest)
library(XML)

pg <- htmlParse("http://www.bvl.com.pe/includes/empresas_todas.dat")
pg %>% html_nodes("a") %>% html_attr("href")

##   [1] "/inf_corporativa71050_JAIME1CP1A.html" "/inf_corporativa10400_INTEGRC1.html"  
##   [3] "/inf_corporativa66100_ACESEGC1.html"   "/inf_corporativa71300_ADCOMEC1.html"  
## ...
## [273] "/inf_corporativa64801_VOLCAAC1.html"   "/inf_corporativa58501_YURABC11.html"  
## [275] "/inf_corporativa98959_ZNC.html"  

That further illustrates rvest's XML package underpinnings.

UPDATE

rvest::read_html() can handle this directly now:

pg <- read_html("http://www.bvl.com.pe/includes/empresas_todas.dat")