R recombinators

An R utility for turning nested lists into data.frames. This can be useful for turning JSON into R lists, and then into data.frames.

Installation

The latest stable build can be downloaded from CRAN:

install.packages("recombinator")

To install the latest development builds directly from GitHub, run this instead:

if (!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("robertzk/recombinator")

Usage

There are two supported formats.

• Homogeneous lists. A list where the first list element is a character vector giving the names of the data.frame, and the subsequent list elements themselves lists of values.
• Heterogeneous lists. A list where each element is a named list of values. In this format, plyr::rbind will be used to take the union of all names and impute the ones missing with NA values.

Here are two examples of the respective format:

recombinator(list(c("a","b","c"), list(1, F, 2), list(2, T, 3)))
#   a     b c
# 1 1 FALSE 2
# 2 2  TRUE 3

recombinator(list(c("a","b","c"), list(1, F, 2), list(2, T, 3)))
# recombinator(list(list(a = 1, b = F, c = 2), list(a = 2, b = T, c = 3)))
#  a     b c
# 1 1 FALSE 2
# 2 2  TRUE 3

# The union of all observed keys is used for column names.
recombinator(list(list(a = 1, b = F, c = 2), list(a = 2, b = T, d = 4)))
#   a     b  c  d
# 1 1 FALSE  2 NA
# 2 2  TRUE NA  4