R convert dataframe to JSON

Question

I have a dataframe that I'd like to convert to json format:

my data frame called res1:

library(rjson)

structure(list(id = c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5), value = structure(1:5, .Label = c("server1", 
"server2", "server3", "server4", "server5"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("id", 
"value"), row.names = c(NA, -5L), class = "data.frame")

when I do:

toJSON(res1)

I get this:

{"id":[1,2,3,4,5],"value":["server1","server2","server3","server4","server5"]}

I need this json output to be like this, any ideas?

[{"id":1,"value":"server1"},{"id":2,"value":"server2"},{"id":3,"value":"server3"},{"id":4,"value":"server4"},{"id":5,"value":"server5"}]

Answer 1

The jsonlite package exists to address exactly this problem: "A practical and consistent mapping between JSON data and R objects."

Its toJSON function provides this desired result with the default options:

library(jsonlite)
x <- toJSON(res1)
cat(x)

## [{"id":1,"value":"server1"},{"id":2,"value":"server2"},
## {"id":3,"value":"server3"},{"id":4,"value":"server4"},
## {"id":5,"value":"server5"}]

Answer 2

How about

library(rjson)
x <- toJSON(unname(split(res1, 1:nrow(res1))))
cat(x)
# [{"id":1,"value":"server1"},{"id":2,"value":"server2"},
# {"id":3,"value":"server3"},{"id":4,"value":"server4"},
# {"id":5,"value":"server5"}]

By using split() we are essentially breaking up the large data.frame into a separate data.frame for each row. And by removing the names from the resulting list, the toJSON function wraps the results in an array rather than a named object.

Answer 3

Now you can easily just call jsonlite::write_json() directly on the dataframe.