Getting started with matchpointR

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Overview

matchpointR turns the public pages of wtatennis.com into tidy data frames:

Function	Purpose
`wta_player_url()`	Build canonical player URLs.
`wta_get_player_basics()`	One-row tibble with bio parsed from the page’s JSON-LD.
`wta_get_player_overview()`	Career highlights (ranks, titles, prize money).
`wta_get_player_matches()`	One row per match across the full career.
`wta_get_rankings()`	Current singles / doubles leaderboard.

Every function that hits the network opens (and closes) its own headless Chrome session through chromote. Where the WTA site exposes structured schema.org JSON-LD data, matchpointR reads from that in preference to CSS selectors — this is substantially more resilient against site redesigns.

A worked example: Kateřina Siniaková

url <- wta_player_url(320301, "katerina-siniakova")

bio <- wta_get_player_basics(url, download_images = FALSE)
bio

download_images = TRUE (the default) additionally downloads the headshot into a magick-image list-column — set it to FALSE when you only need the metadata.

Career highlights

wta_get_player_overview(url)

Returns a long tibble with one row per metric: singles_rank, doubles_rank, singles_career_titles, doubles_career_titles, career_prize_money, career_high.

Full match history

matches_url <- wta_player_url(320301, "katerina-siniakova", "matches")
matches <- wta_get_player_matches(matches_url)
head(matches)

wta_get_player_matches() clicks the Show more button repeatedly until no more matches are loaded. Raise max_clicks only if you hit the safety cap on a very long career.

Tour-wide data

Live rankings

wta_get_rankings("singles", top = 50)
wta_get_rankings("doubles", top = 50)

Tips

Coercion. All columns are returned as character to stay faithful to the rendered page. Cast to numeric/date downstream.
Selector drift. If a function suddenly returns zero rows, the site’s CSS classes have probably been renamed — open an issue.
Rate limiting. chromote hits the site as a real browser; be considerate if you are iterating over many players.

Not yet covered

Tour-wide statistics leaderboards (aces, winners, break-points converted, …) are tracked in issue #1 for a future release. The WTA site reshuffled its /stats hub and we are waiting for a stable URL pattern before committing to an API.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.