a demotivating httr example - scrape quotes from http://www.despair.com/demotivators.html

demotivate-scrape.R

library(rvest)
library(httr)

dem <- html_session("http://www.despair.com/demotivators.html",
                    user_agent("Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.78.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.6 Safari/537.78.2"))

quotes <- data.frame(category=dem %>% html_nodes(xpath="//div/a/h3") %>% html_text(), 
                     text=dem %>% html_nodes(xpath="//div[@class='tilecontents']/p") %>% html_text(),
                     image_url=dem %>% html_nodes(xpath="//img[@class='tileimg']") %>% html_attr("src"))[-1,]

head(quotes)

output.R

##             category                                                                                                       text                                                                image_url
## 2            Caution                                                       Life doesn't always want to be grabbed by the horns.          http://demotivators.despair.com/viewalldemotivators/caution.jpg
## 3       Wishes (Cow) If wishes were horses then dreamers would ride.  But they're much more like cattle, so best grab a shovel.       http://demotivators.despair.com/viewalldemotivators/wishes-cow.jpg
## 4 Self Esteem (pawn)               It takes genuine talent to see greatness in yourself despite your absence of genuine talent. http://demotivators.despair.com/viewalldemotivators/self-esteem-pawn.jpg
## 5       Preservation               Action will be taken to prevent the next disaster as soon as possible after it has occurred.     http://demotivators.despair.com/viewalldemotivators/preservation.jpg
## 6         Friendship                                                     A friend is just a stranger you haven't alienated yet.       http://demotivators.despair.com/viewalldemotivators/friendship.jpg
## 7          Foresight                        Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those busy proving them right.        http://demotivators.despair.com/viewalldemotivators/foresight.jpg