Retrieving venue data from Foursquare

Foursquare is a local search services company that offers its service on the mobile platform as well as a website. Log in to Foursquare as a developer in order to get the idea of the API request and response patterns. On registering, a unique OAuth token is generated.

In the developer's login, open the explorer from the list of links on the left-hand side panel. Here's a screenshot of the developer's landing page:

In the explorer panel, we can see how the request is being sent, which can again be replicated in R using either the function fromJSON or GET. The data will be retrieved in the JSON format. Here's the screenshot of the explorer panel:

We can now execute the API request from R using the function fromJSON. First, let's get the user details:

fromJSON("https://api.foursquare.com/v2/users/self?oauth_token=<Paste your OAuth token here>")

We get the following output:

The preceding API request provides many details about the user such as name, location...