cleaning up a whitespace delimited table

ucf_olympics.R

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

m200 <- read_html("http://www.alltime-athletics.com/m_100ok.htm")

m2_table <- m200 %>%
  html_nodes("body > center:nth-child(8) > pre")

# make list of rows, split by newline character
m2_table <- m2_table %>%
  as.character() %>%
  str_replace_all("\\\\","") %>% # remove literal backslashes
  str_split(., '\n') # split by newline


# split rows in list by whitespace (>2 consecutive)
m2_mat <- sapply(m2_table[[1]], strsplit, split="\\s{2,}")

# combine rows and columns to dataframe
m2_df <- do.call(rbind.data.frame, m2_mat)

# get rid of broken row and column
m2_df <- m2_df[-1,-1]

#rename reclass
names(m2_df) <- c("place", "time", "delta", "runner", "country", "dob", "unknown", "olympic_city", "date")
m2_df$time <- as.numeric(m2_df$time)
m2_df$dob <- as.POSIXct(m2_df$dob, format="%d.%m.%y")
m2_df$date <- as.POSIXct(m2_df$date, format="%d.%m.%Y")

saveRDS(m2_df, "./olympics.RData")