The DocketScraper.R package depends on RSelenium and Docker.
Selenium is a set of programming tools, a framework, that allows you to automate web browser actions.
RSelenium is a R package that allows you to use Selenium inside R
Docker is software that allows you to run an environment, where you will run Selenium in.
You must install RSelenium through CRAN, and Docker can be downloaded for free from their website.
Handles user input, which could either be to parse a folder full of court docket .pdf files, or to go and scrape court dockets from the pacourts.com website.
Does the work of parsing a bunch of .pdf files.
Input is a vector of file names, and the output is a dataframe in "long" format, such that each row corresponds to a field in the .pdf. A given search might yield multiple results, and each .pdf can be submitted to multiple search terms.
Takes in a name and date of birth of an individual and, if that input yields results for the county of Philadelphia, outputs all of the court docket .pdf files associated with that name and date of birth.
It can also output a table of the court docket numbers, along with other perhaps relevant information, like police incident number and filing date/time.