Parse JSON with R

Question

I am fairly new to R, but the more use it, the more I see how powerful it really is over SAS or SPSS. Just one of the major benefits, as I see them, is the ability to get and analyze data from the web. I imagine this is possible (and maybe even straightforward), but I am looking to parse JSON data that is publicly available on the web. I am not programmer by any stretch, so any help and instruction you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Even if you point me to a basic working example, I probably can work through it.

Answer 1

See: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rjson/index.html

Answer 2

rjson: JSON for R
Converts R object into JSON objects and vice-versa

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rjson/index.html

See also: http://json.org/

Answer 3

RJSONIO from Omegahat is another package which provides facilities for reading and writing data in JSON format.

rjson does not use S4/S3 methods and so is not readily extensible, but still useful. Unfortunately, it does not used vectorized operations and so is too slow for non-trivial data. Similarly, for reading JSON data into R, it is somewhat slow and so does not scale to large data, should this be an issue.