A basic web scraper for Instagram. Functions included in this package can retrieve the following information:
From username
- Number of posts
- Number of followers
- Number following
From hashtag
- Number of posts
Install R software for your system. Install dependency packages. Then, install iscrape from GitHub using devtools
install.packages(c("devtools","dplyr","httr","stringr"),dep=T)
devtools::install_github("royfrancis/iscrape")We will use the username "instagram" to get information from this page: https://www.instagram.com/instagram/
Get the user webpage.
library(iscrape)
# get webpage
pu <- get_page_user("instagram")From the webpage, get post count, follower count and following count.
get_count_post(pu)
instagram
4729
get_count_follower(pu)
instagram
226200000
get_count_following(pu)
instagram
197 Get posts, followers and following as a data.frame from a vector of usernames.
get_page_info(c("instagram","travelandleisure","minimalism")) username posts followers following
1 instagram 6250 335800000 223
2 travelandleisure 6091 4900000 440
3 minimalism 856 249600 129
We will use the hashtag "instagram" to get information from this page: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/instagram/
Get the hashtag webpage.
# get webpage
ph <- get_page_hashtag("instagram")From the webpage, get post count.
get_count_hashtag(ph)
instagram
171200000 Note that web scraping is discouraged by Instagram. Do not use this tool to scraping thousands of pages or it is likely that your IP address may be blocked by Instagram. Speaking of IP addresses, it might be a good idea to use a VPN when using this tool.
This package was created for personal use, but you are free to use it. The package is very simple relying on text pattern matching. This means that the code is functional at the time of writing, but future changes to Instagram page structure may cause these functions to break. This package is unlikely to be updated or maintained regularly.
2020 | Roy Francis