How to create a nested structure when transforming dataframe to json object in R

Question

I am trying to use the function toJSON from the library jsonlite in R to transform a dataframe into json, however the formats that it returns by default are not suitable for me.

Considering the following example:

df <- data.frame(id = c(1,2), val1 = c("A", "B"), val2 = c("C", "D"))

If I use toJSON(df), here's what I get:

[{"id":1,"val1":"A","val2":"C"},{"id":2,"val1":"B","val2":"D"}]

Instead what I want is as close as possible to this:

[
  "1": {"val1":"A","val2":"C"},
  "2":{"val1":"B","val2":"D"}
]

How can I transform df in a way that I can accomplish it? Just to be clear, my case has a very long dataframe with additional columns. I want the value of one specific column to be the key to the rest of the row.

Thanks!

akrun · Accepted Answer · 2019-11-14 19:57:07Z

2

An option is to split by 'id' and then apply toJSON

library(jsonlite)
toJSON(split(df[-1], df$id))

If we want to remove the []

gsub("[][]", "", toJSON(split(df[-1], df$id)))
#{"1":{"val1":"A","val2":"C"},"2":{"val1":"B","val2":"D"}}

edited Nov 14, 2019 at 19:57

answered Nov 14, 2019 at 19:27

akrun

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2 Comments

José Luiz Ferreira Over a year ago

Nice! Can I get rid of the list thought? I got {"1":[{"val1":"A","val2":"C"}],"2":[{"val1":"B","val2":"D"}]}

akrun Over a year ago

@JoséLuizFerreira Try with auto_unbox = TRUE

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