R/util.R

In wenshuoliu/nbaPlayerTracking: Analysis of NBA data (Title Case)

#' function that grabs the data from the website and converts to R data frame
#'
#' @param address address of the data in json format
#'
#' @return data in R-data.frame
#'
#' @export
readIt <- function(address) {
  web_page <- readLines(address)

  ## regex to strip javascript bits and convert raw to csv format
  x1 <- gsub("[\\{\\}\\]]", "", web_page, perl = TRUE)
  x2 <- gsub("[\\[]", "\n", x1, perl = TRUE)
  x3 <- gsub("\"rowSet\":\n", "", x2, perl = TRUE)
  x4 <- gsub(";", ",", x3, perl = TRUE)

  # read the resulting csv with read.table()
  nba <- read.table(textConnection(x4), header = T, sep = ",", skip = 2, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
  return(nba)
}