How do I import data from json format into R using jsonlite package

Question

I am doing this

newzips=fromJSON("http://media.mongodb.org/zips.json")

You can see the data yourself at http://media.mongodb.org/zips.json

and getting thus

str(newzips)
 List of 5
 $ city : chr "ACMAR"
 $ loc  : num [1:2] -86.5 33.6
 $ pop  : num 6055
 $ state: chr "AL"
 $ _id  : chr "35004\"}{\"city\":\"ADAMSVILLE\",\"loc\":[-86.959727,33.588437],\"pop\":10616,\"state\":\"AL\",\"_

Answer 1

This format is called jsonlines. You can import it using the stream_in function in jsonite:

library(jsonlite)
zips <- stream_in(url("http://media.mongodb.org/zips.json"))

If the server uses https, you can use the curl package:

library(jsonlite)
library(curl)
zips <- stream_in(curl("https://media.mongodb.org/zips.json"))

Datasets where each line is a record are usually nosql database dumps. Because they might be too large to parse all at once, they are meant to be imported line-by-line, which is exactly what jsonlite does.