Scraping with rvest - complete with NAs when tag is not present

I want to parse this HTML: and get this elements from it:

a) p tag, with class: "normal_encontrado".
b) div with class: "price".

Sometimes, the p tag is not present in some products. If this is the case, an NA should be added to the vector collecting the text from this nodes.

The idea is to have 2 vectors with the same length, and after join them to make a data.frame. Any ideas?

The HTML part:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>

<div class="product_price" id="product_price_186251">
  <p class="normal_encontrado">
    S/. 2,799.00
  </p>

  <div id="WC_CatalogEntryDBThumbnailDisplayJSPF_10461_div_10" class="price">
    S/. 2,299.00
  </div>    
</div>

<div class="product_price" id="product_price_232046">
  <div id="WC_CatalogEntryDBThumbnailDisplayJSPF_10461_div_10" class="price">
    S/. 4,999.00
  </div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

R Code:

library(rvest)

page_source <- read_html("r.html")

r.precio.antes <- page_source %>%
html_nodes(".normal_encontrado") %>%
html_text()

r.precio.actual <- page_source %>%
html_nodes(".price") %>%
html_text()

Using the XML package parse the input with xmlTreeParse and then use xpathSApply to interate over the product_price class div nodes. For each such node the anonyous function gets the value of the div and p subnodes. The resulting character matrix m is reworked into a data frame DF and the columns are cleaned removing any character that is not a dot or digit and also removing any dot followed by a non-digit. Copnvert result to numeric. Note that no special processing for the missing p case is needed.

# input

Lines <- '<html>
<head></head>
<body>

<div class="product_price" id="product_price_186251">
  <p class="normal_encontrado">
    S/. 2,799.00
  </p>

  <div id="WC_CatalogEntryDBThumbnailDisplayJSPF_10461_div_10" class="price">
    S/. 2,299.00
  </div>    
</div>

<div class="product_price" id="product_price_232046">
  <div id="WC_CatalogEntryDBThumbnailDisplayJSPF_10461_div_10" class="price">
    S/. 4,999.00
  </div>
</div>
</body>
</html>'

# code to read input and produce a data.frame

library(XML)
doc <- xmlTreeParse(Lines, asText = TRUE, useInternalNodes = TRUE)

m <- xpathSApply(doc, "//div[@class = 'product_price']", function(node) {
  list(p = xmlValue(node[["p"]]), div = xmlValue(node[["div"]])) })

DF <- as.data.frame(t(m), stringsAsFactors = FALSE) # rework into data frame
DF[] <- lapply(DF, function(x) as.numeric(gsub("[^.0-9]|[.]\\D", "", x))) # clean

The result is:

> DF
     p  div
1 2799 2299
2   NA 4999

If the tag is not found, rvest returns a character(0). So assuming you will find at most one current and one regular price in each div.product_price, you can use this:

pacman::p_load("rvest", "dplyr")

get_prices <- function(node){
  r.precio.antes <- html_nodes(node, 'p.normal_encontrado') %>% html_text
  r.precio.actual <- html_nodes(node, 'div.price') %>% html_text

  data.frame(
    precio.antes = ifelse(length(r.precio.antes)==0, NA, r.precio.antes),
    precio.actual = ifelse(length(r.precio.actual)==0, NA, r.precio.actual), 
    stringsAsFactors=F
  )

}

doc <- read_html('test.html') %>% html_nodes("div.product_price")
lapply(doc, get_prices) %>%
  rbind_all

Edited: I misunderstood the input data, so changed the script to work with just a single html page.

Scraping with rvest - complete with NAs when tag is not present

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