Working with HTML and JSON: Approach

Overview

For this assignment, I plan to use three books about space and astronomy to practice working with HTML and JSON. I chose this subject because I enjoy learning about space. I will record the same book information in both formats, load each file into R, and compare the resulting data frames.

Selected Books

The three books I plan to use are Cosmos by Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, and Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott. The third book has multiple authors, which meets the assignment requirement.

For each book, I will record its title, authors, publication year, publisher, and ISBN. I will check the details against publisher or library records and make sure the year, publisher, and ISBN refer to the same edition.

Planned Approach

First, I will manually create an HTML file named books.html. It will contain a table with one row for each book and columns for the five attributes I selected.

Next, I will manually create a JSON file named books.json containing the same information. I will represent each book as an object and store its authors in an array so that the book with multiple authors is represented clearly.

I will upload both files to a public GitHub repository. My R code will read them from their online locations using rvest for the HTML table and jsonlite for the JSON data.

After importing the files, I will make their column names, data types, and row order consistent. I will also convert the JSON author arrays into the same author-text format used in the HTML table. Then I will use identical() to check whether the two data frames match. If they do not, I will use all.equal() to help identify the differences.

Anticipated Challenges

One challenge will be representing multiple authors correctly in both formats. The HTML table will store the authors together in one cell, while JSON will store them in an array. I will need to account for that difference when comparing the imported data.

I will also check quotation marks, commas, brackets, and HTML tags carefully because a small formatting mistake could prevent a file from loading correctly. I will keep ISBNs as text so they are treated as identifiers rather than numbers.

Expected Outcome

I expect both files to contain the same book information, even though they organize it differently. I will report whether the imported data frames are identical before and after making their structures consistent, and explain any differences I find.