2013-07-20

Searching for chemical substances based on ATC codes from WHO search engine.

The concept of how to grep search engine results with R had been one of my lingering thoughts. Because sometimes it's just feels easier if I could just grep search engine results than to find a dataset or complete database of a certain thing.

So when at work I had to use ATC codes to get the substances out or the pharmaceutical(?) use. So while no-one was looking I naturally had to devise the following script. This snippet is more or less done, a part of a imaginary whole if you will. It lacks the functionality to search for partial matches. So you can't just look for all the "B01" codes. Probably doing that extension next when I have the time. Also you can't use this for substance to ATC code. But for now this one way ticket, the basic concept as a snippet. Naturally comments about making it more readable and/or efficient are always welcome.

1 comment:

  1. Hallo Xachriel,
    I have been looking something like this for a while. I wonder whether you had the chance to go further with it and reverse the serach for example (name -> ATC class) or make a batch query ...
    Great thanks
    Andrea Zaliani

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