readthat 
Quickly read text/source from local files and web pages.
Installation
You can install the development released version of readthat from Github with:
remotes::install_github("mkearney/readthat")Examples
Let’s say we want to read-in the source of the following websites:
## a vector of URLs
urls <- c(
"https://mikewk.com",
"https://cnn.com",
"https://www.cnn.com/us"
)Use readthat::read() to read the text/source of a single file/URL
## read single web/file (returns text vector)
x <- read(urls[1])
## preview output
substr(x, 1, 60)
#> [1] "<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html lang=\"en\">\n<head>\n\n <meta charset=\"ut"
## use apply functions to read multiple pages
xx <- sapply(urls, read)
## preview output
lapply(xx, substr, 1, 60)
#> $`https://mikewk.com`
#> [1] "<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html lang=\"en\">\n<head>\n\n <meta charset=\"ut"
#>
#> $`https://cnn.com`
#> [1] "<!DOCTYPE html><html class=\"no-js\"><head><meta content=\"IE=e"
#>
#> $`https://www.cnn.com/us`
#> [1] "<!DOCTYPE html><html class=\"no-js\"><head><meta content=\"IE=e"Comparisons
Benchmark comparison for reading a text file:
## save a text file
writeLines(read(urls[1]), x <- tempfile())
## coompare read times
bm_file <- bench::mark(
readr = readr::read_lines(x),
readthat = read(x),
readLines = readLines(x),
check = FALSE
)
## view results
bm_file
#> # A tibble: 3 x 6
#> expression min median `itr/sec` mem_alloc `gc/sec`
#> <bch:expr> <bch:tm> <bch:tm> <dbl> <bch:byt> <dbl>
#> 1 readr 262.2µs 273.9µs 3517. 3.69MB 4.05
#> 2 readthat 83.7µs 86.2µs 10741. 28.65KB 4.04
#> 3 readLines 144.8µs 150.7µs 6311. 13.16KB 0
Benchmark comparison for reading a web page:
x <- "https://www.espn.com/nfl/scoreboard"
bm_html <- bench::mark(
httr = httr::content(httr::GET(x), as = "text", encoding = "UTF-8"),
xml2 = xml2::read_html(x),
readthat = read(x),
readLines = readLines(x, warn = FALSE),
readr = readr::read_lines(x),
check = FALSE,
iterations = 25,
filter_gc = TRUE
)
bm_html
#> # A tibble: 5 x 6
#> expression min median `itr/sec` mem_alloc `gc/sec`
#> <bch:expr> <bch:tm> <bch:tm> <dbl> <bch:byt> <dbl>
#> 1 httr 71.5ms 104ms 6.84 2.7MB 0.285
#> 2 xml2 187.9ms 200ms 4.50 1.85MB 1.42
#> 3 readthat 48.6ms 52ms 14.1 23.9KB 0
#> 4 readLines 375.9ms 472ms 1.95 620.33KB 0
#> 5 readr 158.6ms 169ms 5.57 799.7KB 0.232