Joachim Zuckarelli announces a new package:
The new R package flatxml provides functions to easily deal with XML files. When parsing an XML document fxml_importXMLFlat produces a special dataframe that is ‘flat’ by its very nature but contains all necessary information about the hierarchical structure of the underlying XML document (for details on the dataframe see the reference for the fxml_importXMLFlat function). flatxml offers a set of functions to work with this dataframe.
Apart from representing the XML document in a dataframe structure, there is yet another way in which flatxml relates to dataframes: the fxml_toDataFrame function can be used to extract data from an XML document into a dataframe, e.g. to work on the data with statistical functions. Because in this case there is no need to represent the XML document structure as such (it’s all about the data contained in the document), there is no representation of the hierarchical structure of the document any more, it’s just a normal dataframe.
Very interesting. I’ve struggled a bit more with the xml2 package than I’d care to admit, so I might give this one a try. H/T R-bloggers