Process Stanford departments XML data into a data frame

Parses XML data containing Stanford University department information into a structured data frame. The function processes hierarchical XML data where departments are nested within schools, extracting department codes, full names, and their associated schools.

Usage

process_departments_xml(xml_doc)

Arguments

xml_doc

An xml2 document object containing Stanford departments data. Expected to have a structure with school nodes containing department nodes.

Value

A tibble with three columns:

• name: Character. Department code/abbreviation (e.g., "CS")

• longname: Character. Full department name (e.g., "Computer Science")

• school: Character. Name of the school containing the department

Details

The function performs the following steps:

1. Locates all school nodes in the XML using XPath

2. For each school, extracts its name and finds all department nodes

3. For each department, extracts:

   • Department code (name)

   • Full department name (longname)

   • Associated school name (school)

4. Combines all departments into a single data frame

The function includes error handling for:

• Missing school data

• Missing department data

• XML parsing errors

Error handling

If no schools or departments are found in the XML, an error is thrown.

See also

• xml2::xml_find_all() for the XML parsing functionality

• fetch_departments() for the public interface to this functionality

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
xml_data <- xml2::read_xml("departments.xml")
departments_df <- process_departments_xml(xml_data)
} # }