Working with JSON Data

Acquire Data

library(jsonlite)
yelp <- fromJSON("https://www.dropbox.com/s/gd1k41y9gbpfwq3/yelp_academic_dataset_business.json")

install.packages('curl')

‘jsonlite’ actually has a function to deal with this ‘NDJSON’ file type with ‘stream_in()’ function

need to use ‘file()’ function to create a ‘connection’ for accessing to the files on your disk when you use ‘stream_in()’ function.

53MB JSON data upload to R Studio. To import, add “ marks (source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2617600/importing-data-from-a-json-file-into-r/50965690#50965690)

library(jsonlite)
yelp <- stream_in(file("yelp_academic_dataset_business.json"))

head(yelp,10)

find out how the data has been imported by quickly running ‘str()’ function.

str(yelp)

use ‘flatten()’ function from ‘jsonlite’ package to make the nested hiearchical data structure into a flatten manner by assigning each of the nested variable as its own column as much as possible.

yelp_flat <- flatten(yelp)
str(yelp_flat)

to make it easier to see the data frame data in R console UI, use use ‘as_data_frame()’ function from the new package called ‘tibble’

library(tibble)
yelp_tbl <- as_data_frame(yelp_flat)
yelp_tbl