healthforum

A package for scraping patientforum discussion threads.

Installation

You can install the released version of healthforum from CRAN with:

install.packages("healthforum")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("LingshuHu/healthforum")

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to scrape this discussion thread from patient.info.

## load healthforum
library(healthforum)

## scrape pages 1-2 from thread about gastritis
gas <- scrape_one_post(
  url = "https://patient.info/forums/discuss/can-gastritis-be-cured--613999",
  From = 1, To = 2)
#> Warning in FUN(X[[i]], ...): NAs introduced by coercion

Preview the returned data frame

tibble::as_tibble(gas)
#> # A tibble: 346 x 13
#>    posts_id post_time           types user_names reply_names likes replies text 
#>  * <chr>    <dttm>              <chr> <chr>      <chr>       <dbl>   <dbl> <chr>
#>  1 613999   2017-09-30 10:38:00 main… TheWolver… <NA>            4     343 I ha…
#>  2 2858159  2017-09-30 14:37:00 reply pippa58442 TheWolveri…     1     332 Gast…
#>  3 2858195  2017-09-30 15:42:00 nest… suzanne_6… pippa58442      0       0 Yes …
#>  4 2858274  2017-09-30 17:56:00 nest… TheWolver… pippa58442      0       0 Will…
#>  5 2858298  2017-09-30 18:27:00 nest… pippa58442 TheWolveri…     1       0 To b…
#>  6 2858300  2017-09-30 18:31:00 nest… TheWolver… pippa58442      0       0 Dont…
#>  7 2858367  2017-09-30 20:22:00 nest… pippa58442 TheWolveri…     0       0 The …
#>  8 2858405  2017-09-30 21:17:00 nest… TheWolver… pippa58442      0       0 HOW …
#>  9 2858502  2017-09-30 23:04:00 nest… pippa58442 TheWolveri…     0       0 I ha…
#> 10 2858730  2017-10-01 08:34:00 nest… TheWolver… <NA>            0       0 I ha…
#> # ... with 336 more rows, and 5 more variables: post_title <chr>, join_date <dttm>,
#> #   posts_num <dbl>, profile_text <chr>, group_names <chr>