As I work on developing a web scraping script, I often encounter errors that require me to handle exceptions. Despite using a tryCatch function to catch these errors, I still see error messages popping up. To suppress these messages, I have used the suppressMessages function. However, even with this in place, I am facing an issue where a new value assigned to a variable upon encountering an error does not seem to stick. This behavior is puzzling me as I am looking for similar functionality to Python's try and except.
The snippet of code causing trouble is outlined below:
tryCatch({suppressMessages(
{found_university <- css_find(css_list$university)
google_university <- found_university$getElementText()[[1]]}
)
},
error = function(e){
found_university <- ""
})
When an error occurs and the variable found_university has not been defined prior, the following error message is triggered:
Error: object 'found_university' not found