toJSON, fromJSON {jsonlite} | R Documentation

## Convert R objects to/from JSON

### Description

These functions are used to convert between JSON data and R objects. The `toJSON` and `fromJSON` functions use a class based mapping, which follows conventions outlined in this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.2805 (also available as vignette).

### Usage

    fromJSON(txt, simplifyVector = TRUE, simplifyDataFrame = simplifyVector,
      simplifyMatrix = simplifyVector, flatten = FALSE, ...)

    toJSON(x, dataframe = c("rows", "columns", "values"), matrix = c("rowmajor",
      "columnmajor"), Date = c("ISO8601", "epoch"), POSIXt = c("string",
      "ISO8601", "epoch", "mongo"), factor = c("string", "integer"),
      complex = c("string", "list"), raw = c("base64", "hex", "mongo"),
      null = c("list", "null"), na = c("null", "string"), auto_unbox = FALSE,
      digits = 4, pretty = FALSE, force = FALSE, ...)

### Arguments

`txt` | a JSON string, URL or file
`simplifyVector` | coerce JSON arrays containing only primitives into an atomic vector
`simplifyDataFrame` | coerce JSON arrays containing only records (JSON objects) into a data frame
`simplifyMatrix` | coerce JSON arrays containing vectors of equal mode and dimension into matrix or array
`flatten` | automatically `flatten` nested data frames into a single non-nested data frame
`...` | arguments passed on to class specific `print` methods
`x` | the object to be encoded
`dataframe` | how to encode data.frame objects: must be one of 'rows', 'columns' or 'values'
`matrix` | how to encode matrices and higher dimensional arrays: must be one of 'rowmajor' or 'columnmajor'.
`Date` | how to encode Date objects: must be one of 'ISO8601' or 'epoch'
`POSIXt` | how to encode POSIXt (datetime) objects: must be one of 'string', 'ISO8601', 'epoch' or 'mongo'
`factor` | how to encode factor objects: must be one of 'string' or 'integer'
`complex` | how to encode complex numbers: must be one of 'string' or 'list'
`raw` | how to encode raw objects: must be one of 'base64', 'hex' or 'mongo'
`null` | how to encode NULL values within a list: must be one of 'null' or 'list'
`na` | how to print NA values: must be one of 'null' or 'string'. Defaults are class specific
`auto_unbox` | automatically `unbox` all atomic vectors of length 1. It is usually safer to avoid this and instead use the `unbox` function to unbox individual elements. An exception is that objects of class `AsIs` (i.e. wrapped in `I()`) are not automatically unboxed. This is a way to mark single values as length-1 arrays.
`digits` | max number of decimal digits to print for numeric values. Use `I()` to specify significant digits. Use `NA` for max precision.
`pretty` | adds indentation whitespace to JSON output. Can be TRUE/FALSE or a number specifying the number of spaces to indent. See `prettify`
`force` | unclass/skip objects of classes with no defined JSON mapping

### Details

The `toJSON` and `fromJSON` functions are drop-in replacements for the identically named functions in packages `rjson` and `RJSONIO`. Our implementation uses an alternative, somewhat more consistent mapping between R objects and JSON strings.

The `serializeJSON` and `unserializeJSON` functions in this package use an alternative system to convert between R objects and JSON, which supports more classes but is much more verbose.

A JSON string is always unicode, using `UTF-8` by default, hence there is usually no need to escape any characters. However, the JSON format does support escaping of unicode characters, which are encoded using a backslash followed by a lower case `"u"` and 4 hex characters, for example: `"Z\u00FCrich"`. The `fromJSON` function will parse such escape sequences but it is usually preferable to encode unicode characters in JSON using native `UTF-8` rather than escape sequences.

### References

Jeroen Ooms (2014). The `jsonlite` Package: A Practical and Consistent Mapping Between JSON Data and R Objects. arXiv:1403.2805. http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.2805

### Examples

    # Stringify some data
    jsoncars <- toJSON(mtcars, pretty=TRUE)
    cat(jsoncars)

    # Parse it back
    fromJSON(jsoncars)

    # Parse escaped unicode
    fromJSON('{"city" : "Z\\u00FCrich"}')

    # Decimal vs significant digits
    toJSON(pi, digits=3)
    toJSON(pi, digits=I(3))

    ## Not run: retrieve data frame
    data1 <- fromJSON("https://api.github.com/users/hadley/orgs")
    names(data1)
    data1$login

    # Nested data frames:
    data2 <- fromJSON("https://api.github.com/users/hadley/repos")
    names(data2)
    names(data2$owner)
    data2$owner$login

    # Flatten the data into a regular non-nested dataframe
    names(flatten(data2))

    # Flatten directly (more efficient):
    data3 <- fromJSON("https://api.github.com/users/hadley/repos", flatten = TRUE)
    identical(data3, flatten(data2))

    ## End(Not run)

[Package jsonlite version 1.1 Index]