Importing data from a JSON file into R [duplicate]

r json

Is there a way to import data from a JSON file into R? More specifically, the file is an array of JSON objects with string fields, objects, and arrays. The RJSON Package isn't very clear on how to deal with this http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rjson/rjson.pdf.

Solution 1:

First install the rjson package:

install.packages("rjson")

Then:

library("rjson")
json_file <- "http://api.worldbank.org/country?per_page=10&region=OED&lendingtype=LNX&format=json"
json_data <- fromJSON(paste(readLines(json_file), collapse=""))

Update: since version 0.2.1

json_data <- fromJSON(file=json_file)

Solution 2:

jsonlite will import the JSON into a data frame. It can optionally flatten nested objects. Nested arrays will be data frames.

> library(jsonlite)
> winners <- fromJSON("winners.json", flatten=TRUE)
> colnames(winners)
[1] "winner" "votes" "startPrice" "lastVote.timestamp" "lastVote.user.name" "lastVote.user.user_id"
> winners[,c("winner","startPrice","lastVote.user.name")]
    winner startPrice lastVote.user.name
1 68694999          0              Lamur
> winners[,c("votes")]
[[1]]
                            ts user.name user.user_id
1 Thu Mar 25 03:13:01 UTC 2010     Lamur     68694999
2 Thu Mar 25 03:13:08 UTC 2010     Lamur     68694999

Solution 3:

An alternative package is RJSONIO. To convert a nested list, lapply can help:

l <- fromJSON('[{"winner":"68694999",  "votes":[ 
   {"ts":"Thu Mar 25 03:13:01 UTC 2010", "user":{"name":"Lamur","user_id":"68694999"}},   
   {"ts":"Thu Mar 25 03:13:08 UTC 2010", "user":{"name":"Lamur","user_id":"68694999"}}],   
  "lastVote":{"timestamp":1269486788526,"user":
   {"name":"Lamur","user_id":"68694999"}},"startPrice":0}]'
)
m <- lapply(
    l[[1]]$votes, 
    function(x) c(x$user['name'], x$user['user_id'], x['ts'])
)
m <- do.call(rbind, m)

gives information on the votes in your example.

Solution 4:

If the URL is https, like used for Amazon S3, then use getURL

json <- fromJSON(getURL('https://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket/my.json'))