Admittedly I am not the best R coder, and I certainly have a lot to learn, but the code at the link below should provide you with an example of how easy it is to create a very (repeat: very) basic web crawler in R.  If you wanted to do this in SPSS, and I have, , you would have to step outside of the normal syntax language and leverage the Python plugin.

I simply use a function to do my data manipulation, and access that function within a loop before saving out a CSV of the dataset.  Granted this only works when you know the structure of the URLs that you want to scrape, but this is pretty easy and hopefully straightforward.

The code is located here.