Scraping wikipedia table r - html

Question

Trying to scrape the first 8 tables (very high, high, medium, low) from the human development index in Wikipedia.
Started with but getting a list of zero. What am I doing wrong? New to R :(
libray(rvest)
url <- "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index#Complete_list_of_countries"
webpage <- read_html(url)
hdi_tables <- html_nodes(webpage, 'table')
head(hdi_tables, n = 10)
scrape <- url %>%
read_html() %>%
html_nodes(xpath = '//*[#id="mw-content-text"]/div/div[5]/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/table') %>%
html_table()
head(scrape, n=10)

Answer 1

I think it would be easier to work with the original data source:
Select "Human Development Index (HDI)" in both the drop-down select lists, then click the "Download Data" link to get a CSV file named Human Development Index (HDI).csv.
Read it into R:
library(tidyverse)
Human_Development_Index_HDI_ <- read_csv("path/to/Human Development Index (HDI).csv",
skip = 1)
You can reshape the data, get the values for 2015 and classify countries as low, medium, high or very high:
hdi <- Human_Development_Index_HDI_ %>%
gather(Year, HDI, -`HDI Rank (2015)`, -Country) %>%
filter(Year == "2015") %>%
na.omit() %>%
mutate(Year = as.numeric(Year),
classification = cut(HDI,
breaks = c(0, 0.549, 0.699, 0.799, 1),
labels = c("low", "medium", "high", "very_high")))
hdi
# A tibble: 188 x 5
`HDI Rank (2015)` Country Year HDI classification
<int> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <fctr>
1 169 Afghanistan 2015 0.479 low
2 75 Albania 2015 0.764 high
3 83 Algeria 2015 0.745 high
4 32 Andorra 2015 0.858 very_high
5 150 Angola 2015 0.533 low
6 62 Antigua and Barbuda 2015 0.786 high
7 45 Argentina 2015 0.827 very_high
8 84 Armenia 2015 0.743 high
9 2 Australia 2015 0.939 very_high
10 24 Austria 2015 0.893 very_high
# ... with 178 more rows
You could change the filter to get values for 2014 too, if you want to replicate the "change from previous year" values in the Wikipedia table.

Answer 2

If you're okay with parsing the wikipedia markup language instead, you could try using WikipediR to grab the markup of the page (from skimming the documentation, try page_content with as_wikitext set to true). Then you'll get some lines that all look like this:
| 1 || {{steady}} ||style="text-align:left"| {{flag|Norway}} || 0.949 || {{increase}} 0.001
This should be parseable in R using strsplit or something.