Simulate a session in web browser

This set of functions allows you to simulate a user interacting with a website, using forms and navigating from page to page.

• Create a session with html_session(url)

• Navigate to a specified url with jump_to(), or follow a link on the page with follow_link().

• Submit an html_form with session_submit().

• View the history with session_history() and navigate back and forward with back() and forward().

• Extract page contents with html_element() and html_elements(), or get the complete HTML document with read_html().

• Inspect the HTTP response with httr::cookies(), httr::headers(), and httr::status_code().

html_session(url, ...)

is.session(x)

jump_to(x, url, ...)

follow_link(x, i, css, xpath, ...)

back(x)

forward(x)

session_history(x)

session_submit(x, form, submit = NULL, ...)

Arguments

url	A URL, either relative or absolute, to navigate to.
...	Any additional httr config to use throughout the session.
x	A session.
i	A integer to select the ith link or a string to match the first link containing that text (case sensitive).
css	Elements to select. Supply one of css or xpath depending on whether you want to use a CSS selector or XPath 1.0 expression.
xpath	Elements to select. Supply one of css or xpath depending on whether you want to use a CSS selector or XPath 1.0 expression.
form	An html_form to submit
submit	Which button should be used? NULL, the default, uses the first. A string selects a button by its name. A number selects a button based on it relative position.

Examples

s <- html_session("http://hadley.nz")
s %>%
  jump_to("hadley-wickham.jpg") %>%
  jump_to("/") %>%
  session_history()
#>   http://hadley.nz
#>   http://hadley.nz/hadley-wickham.jpg
#> - http://hadley.nz/

s %>%
  jump_to("hadley-wickham.jpg") %>%
  back() %>%
  session_history()
#> - http://hadley.nz
#>   http://hadley.nz

# \donttest{
s %>%
  follow_link(css = "p a") %>%
  html_elements("p")
#> Navigating to http://rstudio.com
#> {xml_nodeset (61)}
#>  [1] <p class="d-inline"><a style="color: #ffffff;font-size: .9em;" href="/bl ...
#>  [2] <p class="d-inline"><a href="/black-lives-matter"> <button class="pt-1 p ...
#>  [3] <p class="d-inline pl-0 pr-3 text-center"><a class="text-white" href="/b ...
#>  [4] <p>The premier IDE for R</p>
#>  [5] <p>RStudio anywhere using a web browser</p>
#>  [6] <p>Put Shiny applications online</p>
#>  [7] <p>Shiny, R Markdown, Tidyverse and more</p>
#>  [8] <p>Do, share, teach and learn data science</p>
#>  [9] <p>An easy way to access R packages</p>
#> [10] <p>Let us host your Shiny applications</p>
#> [11] <p>The premier software bundle for data science teams</p>
#> [12] <p>RStudio for the Enterprise</p>
#> [13] <p>Connect data scientists with decision makers</p>
#> [14] <p>Control and distribute packages</p>
#> [15] <p>RStudio</p>
#> [16] <p>RStudio Server</p>
#> [17] <p>Shiny Server</p>
#> [18] <p>R Packages</p>
#> [19] <p>RStudio Cloud</p>
#> [20] <p>RStudio Public Package Manager</p>
#> ...
# }