NBA-Predict | predicting nba superstars | Video Utils library

I have performed a couple of webscraping tasks using RSelenium so let me share a working code for your use case. This is not a direct solution to your question, rather one of the possible methods. Hope this helps!

Looking at the HTML code the table is a bit mis-shaped. One approach is to grab then entire table and then collect the Elo scores.

Looking for the css tag "table", three tables were found. Manually looking at each one, table 3 was the one of interest.

I tried parse the data using rvest, but it seems that challenging problem here is to click dropdown menu, represented by tag in HTML structure. So I equipped heavy artillery - RSelenium which is browser emulator. Using it everything became easy, thanks to the answer on SO: library(RSelenium) library(rvest) url_nba <- 'https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2017-nba-predictions/' #initiate RSelenium. If it doesn't work, try other browser engines rD <- rsDriver(port=4444L,browser="firefox") remDr <- rD$client #navigate to main page remDr$navigate(url_nba) #find the box and click option 10 (April 14 before playoffs) webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = 'xpath', value = "//*[@id='forecast-selector']/div[2]/select/option[10]") webElem$clickElement() # Save html webpage <- remDr$getPageSource()[[1]] # Close RSelenium remDr$close() rD[["server"]]$stop() # Select one of the tables and get it to dataframe webpage_nba <- read_html(webpage) %>% html_table(fill = TRUE) df <- webpage_nba[[3]] # Clear the dataframe names(df) <- df[3,] df <- tail(df,-3) df <- head(df,-4) df <- df[ , -which(names(df) == "NA")] df ELO Carm-ELO 1-Week Change Team Conf. Conf. Semis Conf. Finals Finals Win Title 4 1770 1792 -14 Warriors West 94% 79% 66% 59% 5 1661 1660 -43 Spurs West 90% 62% 15% 11% 6 1600 1603 +33 Raptors East 77% 47% 25% 5% 7 1636 1640 +33 Clippers West 58% 11% 7% 5% 8 1587 1589 -22 Celtics East 70% 42% 24% 4% 9 1587 1584 -9 Wizards East 79% 38% 21% 4% 10 1617 1609 +16 Jazz West 42% 7% 5% 3% 11 1602 1606 -18 Rockets West 70% 27% 5% 3% 12 1545 1541 -22 Cavaliers East 59% 27% 11% 2% 13 1519 1523 +25 Bulls East 30% 15% 7% <1% 14 1526 1520 +37 Pacers East 41% 17% 6% <1% 15 1563 1564 +6 Trail Blazers West 6% 3% 1% <1% 16 1543 1537 -20 Thunder West 30% 8% <1% <1% 17 1502 1502 -3 Bucks East 23% 9% 3% <1% 18 1479 1469 +46 Hawks East 21% 6% 2% <1% 19 1482 1480 -41 Grizzlies West 10% 3% <1% <1% 20 1569 1555 +32 Heat East — — — — 21 1552 1533 +27 Nuggets West — — — — 22 1482 1489 -12 Pelicans West — — — — 23 1463 1472 -18 Timberwolves West — — — — 24 1463 1462 -40 Hornets East — — — — 25 1441 1436 +22 Pistons East — — — — 26 1420 1421 -20 Mavericks West — — — — 27 1393 1395 -2 Kings West — — — — 28 1374 1379 -13 Knicks East — — — — 29 1367 1370 +47 Lakers West — — — — 30 1372 1370 -14 Nets East — — — — 31 1352 1355 -9 Magic East — — — — 32 1338 1348 -29 76ers East — — — — 33 1340 1337 +26 Suns West — — — — If you want to parse other time periods, check the option value in the HTML of the page using the Dev Tools of your browser.

You are reading gzipped data: http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Gzip You have to decompress it.