RSeleniumUtilities

Binaries, webdrivers and a couple of helper functions for the RSelenium package.

Introduction

Selenium is a open source tool that automates web browsers. The RSelenium package is intended to provide access to Selenium and use it for web navigation and to ease the path for web scraping and/or web side testing in R. RSeleniumUtilities is a companion package that contains the Selenium Server file as well as various driver files and helper functions.

Available Webbrowsers

• Firefox (Windows & Linux)
• Google Chrome (Windows & Linux)
• Internet Explorer (Windows)

Versions numbers

• Selenium Server (2.44.0)
• Internet Explorer Binding (2.44.0)
• Google Chrome Binding (2.12)

Tutorial

The RSelenium Github page has a couple of nice tutorials available. Furthermore, there is the RSelenium Webinar.

Reason for the RSeleniumUtilities package

The CRAN Repository Policy propose, as a general rule, that neither data nor documentation should exceed 5MB. Where a large amount of "data" (read here jar files and webdriver) is required, consideration should be given to a separate data-only package which can be updated only rarely (since older versions of packages are archived in perpetuity).

As a result of that, the RSeleniumUtilities is a binary and jar files-only package. It exist another package, RSelenium, which is intended to provide access to Selenium.

Installation

The RSeleniumUtilities is not available on CRAN, but you can install it from Github with devtools:

Windows:

source("https://rawgit.com/greenore/initR/master/init.R")
packagesGithub("RSeleniumUtilities", repo_name="greenore")

Linux:

source(pipe(paste("wget -O -", "https://rawgit.com/greenore/initR/master/init.R")))
packagesGithub("RSeleniumUtilities", repo_name="greenore")

Usage

The helper function «checkSelenium()» copies all the necessary binaries and sets the environment variables.

RSeleniumUtilities::checkSelenium()

There are three utility function for easy and automated access to the different browsers:

remDr <- ieDriver()
remDr <- firefoxDriver(use_profile=TRUE, profile_name="selenium")
remDr <- chromeDriver(use_profile=TRUE, profile_name="selenium", internal_testing=TRUE)