Use the doogal.co.uk API to get data about a postcode

get_doogal_data.R

# Use the doogal.co.uk API to get data about a postcode
# Doesn't accept a vector of codes all at once, so use with purrr::map_dfr()
# along a vector to combine results into a data frame

get_doogal_data <- function(postcode) {

  data_names <- c(
    "postcode",
    "latitude",
    "longitude",
    "quality",
    "constituency",
    "district",
    "ward",
    "lsoa11nm",
    "county",
    "region",
    "country",
    "national_park",
    "altitude",
    "rural_urban"
    )

  endpoint <- "https://www.doogal.co.uk/GetPostcode.ashx?postcode="

  paste0(endpoint, postcode) %>%
    utils::URLencode() %>%
    xml2::read_html() %>%
    rvest::html_node("p") %>%
    rvest::html_text() %>%
    readr::read_delim("\t", col_names = data_names)
}