This section lists some examples of public HTTP APIs that publish data in JSON format. These are great to get a sense of the complex structures that are encountered in real world JSON data. All services are free, but some require registration/authentication. Each example returns lots of data, therefore not all output is printed in this document.
library(jsonlite)Github is an online code repository and has APIs to get live data on almost all activity. Below some examples from a well known R package and author:
hadley_orgs <- fromJSON("https://api.github.com/users/hadley/orgs")
hadley_repos <- fromJSON("https://api.github.com/users/hadley/repos")
gg_commits <- fromJSON("https://api.github.com/repos/hadley/ggplot2/commits")
gg_issues <- fromJSON("https://api.github.com/repos/hadley/ggplot2/issues")
#latest issues
paste(format(gg_issues$user$login), ":", gg_issues$title) [1] "ds-jim : Nothing plotted with manual_scale when a named vector is used as the input."
[2] "thomasp85 : Should ggsave use ragg if available?"
[3] "jdsher : Cannot override.aes with guide_bins?"
[4] "karawoo : Combined facet labels aren't parsed when .multi_line = FALSE"
[5] "mevers : `coord_polar` causes error with `ggtext::element_markdown`"
[6] "yutannihilation : WIP: Deprecate qplot()"
[7] "tdhock : Fix aes(groupS)"
[8] "tdhock : same argument/param in both stat and geom?"
[9] "tdhock : undefined columns selected with groupS aes in custom geom"
[10] "SimonDedman : geom_violin default adjust value for integers"
[11] "tdhock : group column in built data even when aes(group) absent"
[12] "TylerGrantSmith : Add layer names"
[13] "krlmlr : Support ptype argument for scale() functions"
[14] "clauswilke : Annotate all facets with axis ticks and labels for fixed scales"
[15] "evodevosys : theme_void() removes geom_segments (at least visually) when an alpha aesthetic is used"
[16] "hadley : ggsave should use plot theme for default background"
[17] "yqgchen : strip.text.y = element_blank() yields an error when there are multiple layers of strip labels"
[18] "DrrDom : Points fill in legend"
[19] "xvrdm : WIP: Add scale_color_viridis_b"
[20] "thomas-neitmann : `ggsave()` produces aliased png files on Windows"
[21] "atusy : Export pch_table"
[22] "moodymudskipper : default xlim and ylim in qplot are not supportd when non missing"
[23] "yutannihilation : Can geom_abline() draw lines a bit longer than the actual Coord range?"
[24] "vitor-mendes-iq : scale_*_reverse() is ignored when limits are set on Coord"
[25] "LiRogers : Justifying the legend with respect to the full plot area rather than the panel"
[26] "Shians : scale_fill_steps produces unevenly spaced legend when limits are set"
[27] "SimonDedman : Add 'reverse' option to scale_y_date?"
[28] "echasnovski : Add `bounds` argument to `geom_density()`"
[29] "swebs : timezone parameter for scale_x_datetime has no effect"
[30] "jgjl : Update stat_ecdf to work either on the x or the y aesthetic." A single public API that shows location, status and current availability for all stations in the New York City bike sharing imitative.
citibike <- fromJSON("http://citibikenyc.com/stations/json")
stations <- citibike$stationBeanList
colnames(stations) [1] "id" "stationName" "availableDocks" "totalDocks"
[5] "latitude" "longitude" "statusValue" "statusKey"
[9] "availableBikes" "stAddress1" "stAddress2" "city"
[13] "postalCode" "location" "altitude" "testStation"
[17] "lastCommunicationTime" "landMark" nrow(stations)[1] 973The Ergast Developer API is an experimental web service which provides a historical record of motor racing data for non-commercial purposes.
res <- fromJSON('http://ergast.com/api/f1/2004/1/results.json')
drivers <- res$MRData$RaceTable$Races$Results[[1]]$Driver
colnames(drivers)[1] "driverId" "code" "url" "givenName" "familyName" "dateOfBirth"
[7] "nationality" "permanentNumber"drivers[1:10, c("givenName", "familyName", "code", "nationality")] givenName familyName code nationality
1 Michael Schumacher MSC German
2 Rubens Barrichello BAR Brazilian
3 Fernando Alonso ALO Spanish
4 Ralf Schumacher SCH German
5 Juan Pablo Montoya MON Colombian
6 Jenson Button BUT British
7 Jarno Trulli TRU Italian
8 David Coulthard COU British
9 Takuma Sato SAT Japanese
10 Giancarlo Fisichella FIS ItalianBelow an example from the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API where we retrieve the first 10 pages of tax-exempt organizations in the USA, ordered by revenue. The rbind_pages function is used to combine the pages into a single data frame.
#store all pages in a list first
baseurl <- "https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api/v2/search.json?order=revenue&sort_order=desc"
pages <- list()
for(i in 0:10){
mydata <- fromJSON(paste0(baseurl, "&page=", i), flatten=TRUE)
message("Retrieving page ", i)
pages[[i+1]] <- mydata$organizations
}
#combine all into one
organizations <- rbind_pages(pages)
#check output
nrow(organizations)[1] 1100organizations[1:10, c("name", "city", "strein")] name city strein
1 0 DEBT EDUCATION INC SANTA ROSA 46-4744976
2 0 TOLERANCE INC SUWANEE 27-2620044
3 0 U R PASSION KENNEWICK 81-4045228
4 00 MOVEMENT INC PENSACOLA 82-4704419
5 00006 LOCAL MEDIA 22-6062777
6 0003 POSTAL FAMILY CINCINNATI 31-0240910
7 0005 GA HEPHZIBAH 58-1514574
8 0005 WRIGHT-PATT CREDIT UNION BEAVERCREEK 31-0278870
9 0009 DE GREENWOOD 26-4507405
10 0011 CALIFORNIA REDWAY 36-4654777The New York Times has several APIs as part of the NYT developer network. These interface to data from various departments, such as news articles, book reviews, real estate, etc. Registration is required (but free) and a key can be obtained at here. The code below includes some example keys for illustration purposes.
#search for articles
article_key <- "&api-key=b75da00e12d54774a2d362adddcc9bef"
url <- "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v2/articlesearch.json?q=obamacare+socialism"
req <- fromJSON(paste0(url, article_key))
articles <- req$response$docs
colnames(articles) [1] "abstract" "web_url" "snippet" "lead_paragraph" "print_section"
[6] "print_page" "source" "multimedia" "headline" "keywords"
[11] "pub_date" "document_type" "news_desk" "section_name" "byline"
[16] "type_of_material" "_id" "word_count" "uri" "subsection_name" #search for best sellers
books_key <- "&api-key=76363c9e70bc401bac1e6ad88b13bd1d"
url <- "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/books/v2/lists/overview.json?published_date=2013-01-01"
req <- fromJSON(paste0(url, books_key))
bestsellers <- req$results$list
category1 <- bestsellers[[1, "books"]]
subset(category1, select = c("author", "title", "publisher")) author title publisher
1 Gillian Flynn GONE GIRL Crown Publishing
2 John Grisham THE RACKETEER Knopf Doubleday Publishing
3 E L James FIFTY SHADES OF GREY Knopf Doubleday Publishing
4 Nicholas Sparks SAFE HAVEN Grand Central Publishing
5 David Baldacci THE FORGOTTEN Grand Central PublishingThe twitter API requires OAuth2 authentication. Some example code:
#Create your own appication key at https://dev.twitter.com/apps
consumer_key = "EZRy5JzOH2QQmVAe9B4j2w";
consumer_secret = "OIDC4MdfZJ82nbwpZfoUO4WOLTYjoRhpHRAWj6JMec";
#Use basic auth
secret <- jsonlite::base64_enc(paste(consumer_key, consumer_secret, sep = ":"))
req <- httr::POST("https://api.twitter.com/oauth2/token",
httr::add_headers(
"Authorization" = paste("Basic", gsub("\n", "", secret)),
"Content-Type" = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8"
),
body = "grant_type=client_credentials"
);
#Extract the access token
httr::stop_for_status(req, "authenticate with twitter")
token <- paste("Bearer", httr::content(req)$access_token)
#Actual API call
url <- "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=10&screen_name=Rbloggers"
req <- httr::GET(url, httr::add_headers(Authorization = token))
json <- httr::content(req, as = "text")
tweets <- fromJSON(json)
substring(tweets$text, 1, 100) [1] "https://t.co/Jac2KxZJkv in R: How to Make a Computer Vision Model within an R Environment {https://"
[2] "Estimating Group Differences in Network Models using Moderation {https://t.co/3ViArl9OZ2} #rstats #"
[3] "Deep attractors: Where deep learning meets chaos {https://t.co/u3HniDkjWw} #rstats #DataScience"
[4] "R Communities in South Africa {https://t.co/cRBfDMPtBE} #rstats #DataScience"
[5] "Interactively perform a spatial interpolation with the GUInterp Shiny interface {https://t.co/jzidD"
[6] "Advanced Modelling in R with CARET – a focus on supervised machine learning {https://t.co/TSQtoxWrb"
[7] "Color Bars {https://t.co/HJ2Ip24rnb} #rstats #DataScience"
[8] "Why R? Webinar – Neural Networks for Modelling Molecular Interactions with Tensorflow {https://t.co"
[9] "COVID-19: False Positive Alarm {https://t.co/0ufxeYAPQc} #rstats #DataScience"
[10] "#27: R and CRAN Binaries for Ubuntu {https://t.co/yi5Xi9xQT9} #rstats #DataScience"