unbox {jsonlite} | R Documentation

## Unbox a vector or data frame

### Description

This function marks an atomic vector or data frame as a singleton, i.e. a set with exactly 1 element. Thereby, the value will not turn into an `array` when encoded into JSON. This can only be done for atomic vectors of length 1, or data frames with exactly 1 row. To automatically unbox all vectors of length 1 within an object, use the `auto_unbox` argument in `toJSON`.

### Usage

    unbox(x)

### Arguments

`x` | atomic vector of length 1, or data frame with 1 row.

### Details

It is usually recommended to avoid this function and stick with the default encoding schema for the various R classes. The only use case for this function is if you are bound to some specific predefined JSON structure (e.g. to submit to an API), which has no natural R representation. Note that the default encoding for data frames naturally results in a collection of key-value pairs, without using `unbox`.

### Value

Returns a singleton version of `x`.

### References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_(mathematics)

### Examples

    toJSON(list(foo=123))
    toJSON(list(foo=unbox(123)))

    # Auto unbox vectors of length one:
    x = list(x=1:3, y = 4, z = "foo", k = NULL)
    toJSON(x)
    toJSON(x, auto_unbox = TRUE)

    x <- iris[1,]
    toJSON(list(rec=x))
    toJSON(list(rec=unbox(x)))

[Package jsonlite version 1.1 Index]