Extracts the primary party color (or all colors) from a political party's English Wikipedia page. The function scrapes the party infobox for color information.
Arguments
- url
A character vector of Wikipedia URLs for political party pages.
- all_colors
Logical. If `FALSE` (default), returns only the first/primary color. If `TRUE`, returns all colors as a list.
- normalize
Logical. If `TRUE` (default), attempts to normalize color values to uppercase hex codes. Named colors (e.g., "red") are converted to hex codes.
- use_cache
Logical. If `TRUE` (default), looks up data in the bundled `party_data` dataset first before scraping Wikipedia. If `FALSE`, always scrapes live from Wikipedia. Using the cache is much faster and reduces load on Wikipedia servers.
Value
If `all_colors = FALSE`, a character vector of hex color codes (or NA for failed extractions). If `all_colors = TRUE`, a list of character vectors containing all colors for each URL.
Details
By default, this function uses the bundled `party_data` dataset which contains pre-scraped data for major political parties. This provides instant lookups without network requests. If a party is not in the bundled data, the function automatically falls back to live Wikipedia scraping. Set `use_cache = FALSE` to always scrape fresh data from Wikipedia.
The function works by scraping the Wikipedia infobox (vcard table) for spans with background-color style attributes. This depends on Wikipedia's current HTML structure and may occasionally fail if the page structure changes.
For use with `dplyr::mutate()`, this function is vectorized over the `url` argument. Each URL is processed independently.
Examples
# \donttest{
if (curl::has_internet()) {
# Fast lookup using bundled data (default)
get_party_color("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States)")
# Force live scraping for most recent data
get_party_color("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States)",
use_cache = FALSE)
# Multiple parties
urls <- c(
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States)",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_States)"
)
get_party_color(urls)
# Get all colors (some parties have multiple)
get_party_color(urls, all_colors = TRUE)
}
#> [[1]]
#> [[1]][[1]]
#> [1] "#3333FF"
#>
#>
#> [[2]]
#> [[2]][[1]]
#> [1] "#E81B23"
#>
#>
# }