rplaywright: Bridging Playwright to R for Reproducible Web Automation in Research

Static website Scrape Static Website rplaywright can also scrape static websites using methods such as locator, get_by_alt_text, get_by_label, get_by_placeholder, get_by_role, get_by_test_id, get_by_text, and get_by_title. Scan QR Code for example. no-wait no result wait for response has result rplaywright rplaywright R R 11 11 cl a sses classes 186 186 methods methods rplaywright rplaywright R R rplaywright rplaywright R R rplaywright : Bridging Playwright to R for Reproducible Web Automation in Research Erika Siregar University of Sheffield [email protected] rplaywright is an R package that bridges R with the Node.js Playwright library. It enables R users to perform simplified web testing and automation. The package was developed through the rOpenSci Champions Program. RVest RPlaywright Without Browser ✅ Cross browser: Chromium, Firefox, Webkit ✅ Static, dynamic, lazily loaded web page ✅ Static web page only ✅ Wait for request, response, locator, event ✅ No wait for mechanism ✅ Cookie injection ✅ No cookie injection ✅ Script injection ✅ No script injection ✅ Script evaluation, e.g. scroll to bottom to load more ✅ No script evaluation ✅ Multiple browser context ✅ No browser context ✅ Multiple page ✅ Single page ✅ Traditional scraping tools often struggle with dynamic, JavaScript-heavy websites. rplaywright solves this by waiting for page elements and events and interacting directly with the browser Document Object Model (DOM), bringing modern web automation to R. How rplaywright works: Limitations: Node.js Dependency – rplaywright relies on a Node.js-based API, which increases installation size. ✅ Browser Engines – rplaywright downloads dedicated builds (its own versions) of Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. This ensures reproducibility but adds to the package footprint. ✅ Workflow Integration – rplaywright outputs are not yet dataframes, so a short conversion is needed before using %>% or |>. Once structured, they integrate smoothly with packages like dplyr, tidyr, and ggplot2. ✅ Coverage : Contribute: Future Works: Expanded API Coverage – rplaywright does not yet implement all classes and methods of the Node.js Playwright API. Ongoing development and contributions will extend its functionality. ✅ Enhanced R Integration – Compatibility with both magrittr pipe (%>%) and native pipe (|>) is planned to improve workflow fluency. Additional work is also needed to handle methods with identical names by introducing clearer input differentiation. ✅ Use Cases: *For demonstration purposes only; always respect robots.txt when web scraping. Fill Form rplaywright can automate form interactions, such as registration, login, or surveys. Methods include locator, blur, check, clear, click, dblclick, fill, focus, hover, press, select_option, and more. Scan QR Code for example. Fill Form Scraping X post Scrap X Posts rplaywright can handle complex dynamic websites, interacting with the DOM and network. In this example, a cookie is injected into the browser context, and posts are captured from network responses while scrolling to the bottom. Scan QR Code for example. WHAT WHY