Using JSON

Javascript Object Notation (JSON) is a standardized human-readable data format that plays an enormous role in communication between web browsers and web servers. JSON was originally borne out of a need to represent arbitrarily complex data structures in Javascript, a web scripting language, but it has since grown into a language agnostic data serialization format.

It is a common need to import and parse JSON in R, particularly when working with web data. For example, it is very common for websites to offer web services that take an arbitrary query from a web browser, and return the response as JSON. We will look at an example of this very use case later in this section.

For our first look into JSON parsing for R, we'll use the jsonlite package to read a small JSON string, which serializes some information about the best musical act in history, The Beatles:

library(jsonlite) 
 
example.json <- ' 
{ 
  "thebeatles": { 
    "formed": 1960, 
    "members": [ 
      { 
        "firstname...