Let RSelenium scrape the Fangraphs data you want for you
As
Spring Training wraps up, more and more baseball fans start turning to their
favorite stat pages to get ready for fantasy baseball season, and Fangraphs has
become the standard source for stats. If you take your fantasy baseball
seriously and/or you play in a daily fantasy league, you may want to import new
data into R daily for research before you make your lineup choices.
Unfortunately, while R has several useful packages for scraping data off the
web, the ones that seemed obvious to me weren’t ideal for this situation, but I
found a solution with the help of the RSelenium package.
Below I review how to set-up a Firefox profile to make interacting with
RSelenium easier, and then share a basic function for scraping complete
datasets from Fangraphs directly into R.
