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Extract party logo URL from Wikipedia

Source: R/party_logo.R
get_party_logo.Rd

Extracts the party logo image URL from a political party's English Wikipedia page. The function scrapes the party infobox for the logo image.

Usage

get_party_logo(url, use_cache = TRUE)

Arguments

url

A character vector of Wikipedia URLs for political party pages.

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

A character vector of logo image URLs (or NA for failed extractions or pages without logos).

Details

By default, this function uses the bundled `party_data` dataset which contains pre-scraped logo URLs 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 looks for logo images in the Wikipedia infobox. The returned URL is typically a Wikimedia Commons thumbnail URL. Note that some party pages may not have logos, or the logo may be in a non-standard location.

The returned URLs point to image files hosted on Wikimedia servers. These can be used directly in R graphics or downloaded for further processing.

For use with `dplyr::mutate()`, this function is vectorized over the `url` argument.

Examples

# \donttest{
if (curl::has_internet()) {
  # Fast lookup using bundled data (default)
  get_party_logo("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States)")

  # Force live scraping for most recent data
  get_party_logo("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_logo(urls)
}
#> [1] "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/US_Democratic_Party_2025_logo_%28positive%29.svg/330px-US_Democratic_Party_2025_logo_%28positive%29.svg.png"
#> [2] "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/GOP_logo_%28positive%29.svg/250px-GOP_logo_%28positive%29.svg.png"                                          
# }