Web Scraping Data From Yelp Reviews In R

Motivation

While attending Kent State University my favorite place to get a bite to eat and watch a sports game with friends is a bar called Ray's Place. Since my friends and I love it so much I thought it would be a great idea to go through their yelp reviews, data scrape them, and turn them into a usable dataset for future analysis.

Code used

library(rvest)
library(tidyverse)

url <- "https://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-place-kent"
page <- read_html(url)

#Getting Reviews From All Pages
pageNums <- page %>%
html_elements(xpath = "//div[@class=' border-color--default__09f24__NPAKY text-align--center__09f24__fYBGO']") %>%
html_text() %>%
str_extract('of.*') %>%
str_remove('of ') %>%
as.numeric()
pageSequence <- seq(from = 0, to = (pageNums * 10)-10, by = 10)

#store items into vectors
usernames_all = c()
locations_all = c()
dates_all = c()
reviewtext_all = c()
ratings_all = c()

#For loop to retrieve values from all pages
for(i in pageSequence) {
if (i == 0) {
page <- read_html(url)
} else {
page <- read_html(paste0(url, '?start=', i))
}
#Customer Names
usernames <- page %>%
html_elements(xpath = "//div[starts-with(@class, ' user-passport')]") %>%
html_elements(xpath = ".//a[starts-with(@href, '/user_details')]") %>%
html_text()

#Customer Locations
locations <- page %>%
html_elements(xpath = "//div[starts-with(@class, ' user-passport')]") %>%
html_elements(xpath = ".//span[@class= ' css-qgunke']") %>%
html_text() %>%
.[.!="Location"]

#Date Review Was Left
dates <- page %>%
html_elements(xpath = "//div[starts-with(@class, ' review')]") %>%
html_elements(xpath = ".//span[@class= ' css-chan6m']") %>%
html_text()

#Customer Review Text
reviewtext <- page %>%
html_elements(xpath = "//div[starts-with(@class, ' review')]") %>%
html_elements(xpath = "(.//p[starts-with(@class, 'comment')])[1]") %>%
html_text()

#Customer Rating
ratings <- page %>%
html_elements(xpath = "//div[starts-with(@class, ' review')]") %>%
html_elements(xpath = "(.//div[contains(@aria-label, 'star rating')])[1]") %>%
html_attr("aria-label") %>%
str_remove_all(" star rating") %>%
as.numeric()

usernames_all = append(usernames_all, usernames)
locations_all = append(locations_all, locations)
dates_all = append(dates_all, dates)
reviewtext_all = append(reviewtext_all, reviewtext)
ratings_all = append(ratings_all, ratings)

#add N/As to all missing data
length(usernames_all) <- length(dates_all)
length(locations_all) <- length(dates_all)
length(ratings_all) <- length(dates_all)
length(reviewtext_all) <- length(dates_all)

#removing all rows that contains N/A
na.omit(df)

#removing duplicate reviews
dupe <- df [!duplicated(df[c('Review')]),]

}

#Creating data frame
df <- data.frame('Date' = dates_all,
'Username' = usernames_all,
'Located' = locations_all,
'Rating' = ratings_all,
'Review' = reviewtext_all
)

#Save data frame as a CSV
write.csv(df, "yelp-review.csv")

view(df)

Dataset

Click here for the github repository of the project including a CSV of the created dataset!