Scraping drug names and slang from web pages.

This article assumes you have a basic understanding of what “scraping” is, so we will not get into the weeds on theory but more on the application in R using just a few packages: rvest, dplyr and stringr.

Before we start, let me point you to the rvest documentation for installation and release information .

Although the documentation is quite comprehensive, I want to go over some very basic HTML definitions that will make your experience go a lot smoother.

Elements: These are your main “tags” such as <h1> Heading 1 </h1> or <p> Wine is life.</p>. The basic structure of a page is:

<html>
<body>
  #body of your page
</body>
</html>

The rvest::html_nodes() function is what you will use to specify which elements, specifically the CSS selector. For example, calling html_nodes(myhtmldoc, ".CSS-selector span") %>% html_text() will retrieve the text associated with the specified <span> tag. If this doesn’t make sense right away, don’t worry you’ll see an example below.

Attributes: These provide additional information for the element, such as an image source (src) or a link’s path (href). These are usually displayed as key/value pairs, i.e. width="500". You will use rvest::html_attr("YOUR ATTRIBUTE") if you need to get specific details from an attribute.

Finally, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the “Inspect” feature from your browser. This allows your to see the breakdown of any web-page your viewing. This is where you will also find the names for the elements and attributes you want to scrape!

(pro tip: use the “select element feature to jump directly to the element you’re looking for)

Note: rvest cannot handle JS, it only reads the HTML before JS loaded so some objects may not be possible to scrape with this package. However, if you have the inspect console open in your browser, go to the “Network” tab, refresh the page and try looking for a GET request made to an API (api may be in the URL). This is data stored in a JSON file which can be read using jsonlite::fromJSON()

Don’t get intimidated. It’s quite simple.

Write a function to get the name, category and path of a drug

library(conflicted)
suppressMessages(conflict_prefer("filter", "dplyr"))
library(xml2)  # read_html()
library(rvest)  # html_nodes(), html_text()
library(purrr)  # map_dfr()
library(stringr)  # str_to_lower()
library(tibble)  # tibble(),
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr))  # %>%, bind_rows()

get_drug_factsheets <- function(pg_num){
  category <- read_html(paste0("https://www.dea.gov/factsheets?field_fact_sheet_category_target_id=All&page=", pg_num)) %>%
    html_nodes(".teaser-title--drug_fact_sheet span") %>%
    html_text() %>%
    str_to_lower()
  class <- read_html(paste0("https://www.dea.gov/factsheets?field_fact_sheet_category_target_id=All&page=", pg_num)) %>%
    html_nodes(".teaser-category--drug-category") %>%
    html_text() %>%
    str_to_lower()
  #get correct path to factsheet
  path <- read_html(paste0("https://www.dea.gov/factsheets?field_fact_sheet_category_target_id=All&page=", pg_num)) %>%
    html_nodes(".teaser-title--drug_fact_sheet a") %>%
    html_attr("href")
  #return 1x2 tibble
  tibble("class" = class,
         "category" = category,
         "fact_path" = path
         )
}

dea_factsheets <- map_dfr(0:2, get_drug_factsheets)

This information gets us the drug’s category, class and path. We will use the path variable to get available brand names for that particular drug.


# function to pull the data - specifically the brand names of each of
#   the drug types from their factsheets
get_brand <- function(drug_path, drug_category){
  drug_brands <- read_html(paste0("https://www.dea.gov", drug_path)) %>%
    html_nodes(".field--what") %>%  # name of the div with the brand names
    html_text() %>%
    str_remove_all("\n") %>%  # remove line breaks
    str_split(" ", simplify = TRUE) %>%  # split the vector into individual strings
    .[str_detect(., "®")] %>%  # find the strings that include the registered trademark symbol and subset
    str_remove_all(., "[,|.]")  # remove extra characters
  tibble("category" = drug_category,
         "brands" = drug_brands)
}

dea_brands <- map2_dfr(dea_factsheets$fact_path, dea_factsheets$category, get_brand)

usethis::use_data(dea_factsheets, overwrite = TRUE)
usethis::use_data(dea_brands, overwrite = TRUE)