r-web-scraping-cheat-sheet | Guide , reference and cheatsheet on web | Learning library

You are right - the contents on the page are updated by javascript via an ajax request. The server returns a json string in response to an http POST request. With POST requests, the server's response is determined not only by the url you request, but by the body of the message you send to the server. In this case, your body is a simple form with 3 fields: gameName, which is always LOTTO, isAjax which is always true, and drawNumber, which is the field you want to vary.

If you are using httr, you specify these fields as a named list in the body parameter of the POST function.

Once you have the response for each draw, you will want to parse the json into an R-friendly format such as a list or data frame using a library such as jsonlite. From looking at the structure of this particular json, it makes most sense to extract the component $data$drawDetailsand make that a one-row dataframe. This will allow you to bind several draws together into a single data frame.

Here is a function that does all that for you: