could not read webpage with read_html using rvest package from r

Question

I'm trying to scrape the location of product reviewers from amazon. For example, this webpage

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AH55KF4JK5IKKJ77MPOLHOR4YAQQ/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_gw_tr?ie=UTF8][1]

I need to get HAINESVILLE, ILLINOIS, United States

I use rvest package for webscraping.

Here is what I did:

library(rvest)       
url='https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AH55KF4JK5IKKJ77MPOLHOR4YAQQ/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_gw_tr?ie=UTF8'
page = read_html(url)

I got error like below:

Error in open.connection(x, "rb") : HTTP error 403.

But, the following works:

con <- url(url, "rb")
page = read_html(con)

However, with the page I read, I could not extract any text. For example, I want to extract the location of the reviewer.

page %>%
    html_nodes("#customer-profile-name-header .a-size-base a-color-base")%>%
    html_text()

I got nothing

character(0)

Can anyone help figure what I did wrong? Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

This should work:

library(dplyr)
library(rvest)
library(stringr)

# get url
url='https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AH55KF4JK5IKKJ77MPOLHOR4YAQQ/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_gw_tr?ie=UTF8'

# open page
con <- url(url, "rb")
page = read_html(con)

# get the desired information, using View Page Source
page %>%
  html_nodes(xpath=".//script[contains(., 'occupation')]")%>%
  html_text() %>% as.character() %>% str_match(.,"location\":\"(.*?)\",\"personalDescription") -> res

res[,2]