Using 'rvest' to extract links
library(rvest) page <- read_html("http://www.yelp.com/search?find_loc=New+York,+NY,+USA")page %>% html_nodes(".biz-name") %>% html_attr('href')Hope this would simplify your problem
I also was able to clean the results from above which for me were quite noisy
links <- page %>% html_nodes("a") %>% html_attr("href")
with a simple regex string matching
links <- links[which(regexpr('common-url-element', links) >= 1)].