Handling of JSON attributes of 'Object' type about jsonlite

[jeroen]

What you're describing seems to be a problem in rstudio viewer. The jsonlite output seems fine:

> data <- fromJSON("http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Zw9cP5ri")
> data$status
$id
[1] 125125

$message
[1] "Uploaded our first investor deck - http://braincontrol.me/presentations/bc-deck-01.pdf - see the story behind the HTML5 Bitcoin Wallet"

$created_at
[1] "2014-02-17T12:53:25Z"

Try using str and $ to inspect the data, don't rely on rstudio viewer. The viewer can only show tables.

[abnova]

I agree - jsonlite seems to convert JSON objects correctly. This is great news! I checked the data as you recommended and it indeed looks fine.

In regard to using RStudio data viewer, I use it only to browse tabular structures - CSV and data frames. Are you saying that the viewer cannot correctly display data frames with embedded data frames (stored by jsonlite as lists)? I thought so initially, but it doesn't seem to be the case: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22172064/meaning-of-c-in-rstudios-data-browser (see the answer's update).

What is so special about status column that it breaks RStudio data viewer's otherwise correct functionality? Anyway, I'm going to submit an issue report on this problem for RStudio Team.

[jeroen]

I'm not an expert on rstudio, but there is no obvious way of displaying nested data in a table-view. Hence it is not surprising that rstudio viewer is incapable of displaying nested data frames.

[abnova]

Thank you, Jeroen! Just a quick question on jsonlite. If JSON paginated reply contains pages with different number of attributes (columns), would your recommended approach combine them in a result?

getDataPaginated <- function (page) {
  ...
  data <- jsonlite::fromJSON(startupData, simplifyVector = FALSE)
  ...
}

getAngelListData <- function () {
  pages <- 1:getNumPages()
  startups <- lapply(pages, getDataPaginated)
  startups <- do.call(c, startups)
  startups <- jsonlite:::simplify(startups)
  return (startups)
}