Case study: html_element()

What does the function do?

rvest::html_element() is used to extract matching HTML elements/nodes from a web page. You can select nodes using one of two languages: CSS selectors or XPath expressions. These are both mini-languages for describing how to find the node you want. You can think of them like regular expressions, but instead of being design to find patterns in strings, they are designed to find patterns in trees (since HTML nodes form a tree).

Interesting case because CSS selectors are much much simpler and likely to be used the majority of the time. XPath is a much richer and more powerful language, but most of the time that complexity is not required and just adds unneeded overhead. (One interesting wrinkle is that CSS selectors actually use XPath behind the hood because they are transformed using the selectr package by Simon Potter).

html_element() implements these two strategies using mutually exclusive css and xpath arguments.

Other approaches:

• html_element(x, selector, type = c("css", "xpath"))
• html_element(x, css``(pattern``)) vs html_element(x, xpath(pattern))
• html_element_css(x, pattern), html_element_xpath(x,``pattern``)

Common case	Rare case
x |> html_element("sel")	x |> html_element("sel", type = "xpath")
x |> html_element("sel")	x |> html_element(xpath = "sel")
x |> html_element("sel")	x |> html_element(xpath("sel"))
x |> html_element("sel")	x |> html_element_xpath("sel")