In ropenscilabs/roomba: Tidy up nested list hairballs

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
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roomba

This is a package to transform large, multi-nested lists into a more user-friendly format (i.e. a tibble) in R. The initial focus is on making processing of return values from jsonlite::fromJSON() queries more seamless, but ideally this package should be useful for deeply-nested lists from an array of sources.

Key features:

• roomba() searches deeply-nested list for names specified in cols (a character vector) and returns a tibble with the associated column titles. Nothing further about nesting hierarchy or depth need be specified.

• Handles empty values gracefully by substituting NULL values with NA or user-specified value in default, or truncates lists appropriately.

• If you're only interested in sniffing out and replacing all NULLs, turn to the replace_null() function.

• Option to keep any or all data from the columns supplied

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("cstawitz/roomba")

Usage

Say we have some JSON from a pesky API.

library(roomba)

json <- '
  {
    "stuff": {
      "buried": {
        "deep": [
          {
            "location": "here",
            "name": "Laura DeCicco",
            "super_power": "fixing merge conflicts",
            "other_secret_power": []
          },
          {
            "location": "here",
            "name": "Amanda Dobbyn",
            "super_power": "flight",
            "more_nested_stuff": 4
          }
        ],
        "alsodeep": 2342423234,
        "stilldeep": {
          "even_deeper": [
            {
              "location": "not here",
              "name": "Jim Hester",
              "super_power": []
            },
            {
              "location": "here",
              "name": "Christine Stawitz",
              "super_power": "invisibility",
              "more_nested_stuff": 5
            },
            {
              "location": "here",
              "name": "Isabella Velasquez",
              "super_power": "teleportation"
            }
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  }'

The JSON becomes a nested R list,

super_data <- json %>% 
  jsonlite::fromJSON(simplifyVector = FALSE) 

which we can pull data into the columns we want with roomba.

super_data %>%
  roomba(cols = c("name", "super_power", "more_nested_stuff"), keep = any)

Let's try with a real-world Twitter example (see package data to use this data).

roomba(twitter_data, c("created_at", "name"))

Shiny app included!

Run the app like this:

shiny_roomba()

What did that original data look like???

Feast your eyes on the original super_data list!

super_data

And just the first element of the twitter dataset r emo::ji("scream")

twitter_data[[1]]

Happy cleaning!

ropenscilabs/roomba documentation built on July 26, 2021, 7:37 p.m.