Texas Death Row

Goals

To scrape some data from a couple of urls on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice website.

Yet another example using rvest.

• executed offenders
• death row offenders

Setup

library(tidyverse)
library(janitor)
library(rvest)

Working through the exercise

Executed Offenders

Get the HTML tables from the page

# gets the tables from the page as a list
executed_tables <- read_html("https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/death_row/dr_executed_offenders.html") |> 
  html_table()

# selects the first table from the list and cleans headers
executed_raw <- executed_tables[[1]] |> clean_names()

executed_raw

Do the same for the deathrow table.

deathrow_tables <- read_html("https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/death_row/dr_offenders_on_dr.html") |> 
  html_table()

deathrow_raw <- deathrow_tables[[1]] |> clean_names()

deathrow_raw

Export the files

executed_raw |> write_rds("data-raw/tdcj/executed_raw.rds")
deathrow_raw |> write_rds("data-raw/tdcj/deathrow_raw.rds")