Week 7 - HTML and JSON

Introduction

It is now week 7 and the assignment this week will involve HTML and JSON. This assignment is considered a warm up exercise to help us get familiar with the HTML and JSON file formats, and using packages to read these data formats for downstream use in R data frames

Planned Workflow

For my planned workflow, I selected three books involving data science. I chose three books with multiple authors and for each book, I recorded the title, authors, and two to three additional attributes such as the publication year, publisher and ISBN. With the information from the books I manually created two textedit files, one HTML file containing a table with the book data and changed its file type to html. I also used a textedit file and manually created a JSON file with the same data as the html but with the file type .json. I’ll open and load both the html and json files in separate R dataframes, and use tidyverse and dplyr to manipulate the data into a readable format in R. I’ll load the data using rvest to read the html and jsonlite for the json file, ensuring it’s formatted consistently for an identical comparison.

Anticipated Challenges

A challenge I anticipate facing is making sure the syntax in both files are correct to be loaded correctly into R. I manually created these and if I didn’t follow the logic correctly in each of its respective files, my code in R has a high chance of failing if it’s incorrect. Since both files use a unique syntax there’s a fair chance both can load into R in different ways that don’t match each other.