R: Get links or names of external files in HTML document

getHTMLLinks {XML} | R Documentation

## Get links or names of external files in HTML document

### Description

These functions allow us to retrieve either the links within an HTML document, or the collection of names of external files referenced in an HTML document. The external files include images, JavaScript and CSS documents.

### Usage

    getHTMLLinks(doc, externalOnly = TRUE, xpQuery = "//a/@href",
                   baseURL = docName(doc), relative = FALSE)
    getHTMLExternalFiles(doc, xpQuery = c("//img/@src", "//link/@href",
                                          "//script/@href", "//embed/@src"),
                         baseURL = docName(doc), relative = FALSE,
                         asNodes = FALSE, recursive = FALSE)

### Arguments

`doc` | the HTML document as a URL, local file name, parsed document or an XML/HTML node
`externalOnly` | a logical value that indicates whether we should only return links to external documents and not references to internal anchors/nodes within this document, i.e. those that of the form `#foo`.
`xpQuery` | a vector of XPath elements which match the elements of interest
`baseURL` | the URL of the container document. This is used to resolve relative references/links.
`relative` | a logical value indicating whether to leave the references as relative to the base URL or to expand them to their full paths.
`asNodes` | a logical value that indicates whether we want the actual HTML/XML nodes in the document that reference external documents or just the names of the external documents.
`recursive` | a logical value that controls whether we recursively process the external documents we find in the top-level document examining them for their external files.

### Value

`getHTMLLinks` returns a character vector of the links.

`getHTMLExternalFiles` returns a character vector.

### Author(s)

Duncan Temple Lang

### See Also

`getXIncludes`

### Examples

     # site is flaky
      getHTMLLinks("http://www.omegahat.net")

      getHTMLLinks("http://www.omegahat.net/RSXML")

      unique(getHTMLExternalFiles("http://www.omegahat.net"))

[Package XML version 3.99-0.3 Index]