I'm trying my hand at scraping tables from Wikipedia and I'm reaching an impasse. I'm using the squads of the FIFA 2014 World Cup as an example. In this case, I want to extract the list of the participating countries from the table of the contents from the page "2014 FIFA World Cup squads" and store them as a vector. Here's how far I got:
library(tidyverse)
library(rvest)
library(XML)
library(RCurl)
(Countries <- read_html("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_FIFA_World_Cup_squads") %>%
html_node(xpath = '//*[@id="toc"]/ul') %>%
htmlTreeParse() %>%
xmlRoot())
This spits out a bunch of HTML code that I won't copy/paste here. I specifically am looking to extract all lines with the tag <span class="toctext"> such as "Group A", "Brazil", "Cameroon", etc. and have them saved as a vector. What function would make this happen?