Extracting PDF URLs from a webpage

[Aseyingbo]

Hi everyone,

I am new in R and trying to extract PDF URLs from this website. My goal is to download the PDFs from 2017 till date.

(https://dekalbcountyga.legistar.com/DepartmentDetail.aspx?ID=29350&GUID=A51C5572-654E-4DD9-A867-093BF2943C47&R=481ebb46-ce9d-4d0f-a1e2-a3e7895be9c2

Here is my code:

webpage_url <- "https://dekalbcountyga.legistar.com/DepartmentDetail.aspx?ID=29350&GUID=A51C5572-654E-4DD9-A867-093BF2943C47&R=481ebb46-ce9d-4d0f-a1e2-a3e7895be9c2"
link <- webpage %>%
  html_nodes("td:nth-child(8) a")%>%
  html_attr("href")

I got NA NA. Someone kindly assist.

Thank you.

[technocrat]

The target has two records, one of which has no data other than date, time and location. NAs are to be expected.

[Aseyingbo]

Thanks for your response. I used the selector gadget to target the minutes summary column html_nodes("td:nth-child(8) a") in the table. I thought that should fetch me all the urls associated with the node I selected.

How can I better target the (minutes summary)[https://dekalbcountyga.legistar.com/DepartmentDetail.aspx?ID=29350&GUID=A51C5572-654E-4DD9-A867-093BF2943C47&R=481ebb46-ce9d-4d0f-a1e2-a3e7895be9c2] column using rvest? Grateful for any useful guide.

[technocrat]

See this S/O on what's involved in scraping aspx sites that hide content in javascript. From an url standpoint, all pages reachable from the initial url identically rely on two arguments— ID=75127 and GUID=31C18E46-AF97-4F40-B497-1FFA1CBE55FA as an entry point to the js search functionality. Where it goes from there probably requires close study of the js code, something I can't help you with. There appear to be four output options: cut-and-paste from the screen or export to Excel, pdf or Word. To Excel to csv seems most promising.