Accessing html Tables with rvest - html

Question

So I am wanting to scrape some NBA data. The following is what I have so far, and it is perfectly functional:
install.packages('rvest')
library(rvest)
url = "https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/201710180BOS.html"
webpage = read_html(url)
table = html_nodes(webpage, 'table')
data = html_table(table)
away = data[[1]]
home = data[[3]]
colnames(away) = away[1,] #set appropriate column names
colnames(home) = home[1,]
away = away[away$MP != "MP",] #remove rows that are just column names
home = home[home$MP != "MP",]
the problem is that these tables don't include the team names, which is important. To get this information, I was thinking I would scrape the four factors table on the webpage, however, rvest doesnt seem to be recognizing this as a table. The div that contains the four factors table is:
<div class="overthrow table_container" id="div_four_factors">
And the table is:
<table class="suppress_all sortable stats_table now_sortable" id="four_factors" data-cols-to-freeze="1"><thead><tr class="over_header thead">
This made me think that I could access the table via something along the lines of
table = html_nodes(webpage,'#div_four_factors')
but this doesnt seem to work as I am getting just an empty list. How can I access the four factors table?

Answer 1

I am by no means an HTML expert but it appears that the table you are interested in is commented out in the source code then the comment is overridden at some point before being rendered.
If we assume that the Home team is always listed second, we can just use positional arguments and scrape another table on the page:
table = html_nodes(webpage,'#bottom_nav_container')
teams <- html_text(table[1]) %>%
stringr::str_split("Schedule\n")
away$team <- trimws(teams[[1]][1])
home$team <- trimws(teams[[1]][2])
Obviously not the cleanest solution but such is life in the world of web scraping