Fixing JSON Parsing Issues with R: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using jsonlite Package

The issue seems to be with the way R is parsing the JSON string. The asText argument in fromJSON() function is set by default, which means it will return a character string instead of a list of values. However, when this argument is set to TRUE, it doesn’t seem to handle nested JSON objects correctly.

To fix this issue, you can try using the trimws() function from base R to remove any leading or trailing whitespace from the JSON string before passing it to fromJSON(). You can also use the jsonlite package, which provides a more robust implementation of fromJSON() that handles nested objects correctly.

Here’s an example code snippet that uses jsonlite to parse the JSON string:

library(jsonlite)

contJSON = readLines("your_json_file.txt")

# remove trailing newline character
contJSON <- trimws(contJSON, whitespace = c("\n", "\r"))

# split into individual JSON lines and parse each one
results <- lapply(strsplit(contJSON, "\n"), fromJSON)

Make sure to replace "your_json_file.txt" with the actual file name and path of your JSON file.

Alternatively, you can use jsonlite::fromJSON() function without the asText argument, like this:

library(jsonlite)

contJSON = readLines("your_json_file.txt")

# remove trailing newline character
contJSON <- trimws(contJSON, whitespace = c("\n", "\r"))

# parse JSON string directly
results <- fromJSON(contJSON)

This should give you the desired output without any issues.

Last modified on 2023-09-17