[R] Get XML or JSON data from api into data frame

Richard Ohrvall richard.ohrvall at gmail.com
Thu Jul 26 23:52:28 CEST 2012


Thank you Erdal and Hadley for your answeres. It now works perfectly.
Also, I will look at the github solution, even if I don't have any
experience of Ruby.

Once again, thank you.
Richard

2012/7/26 Hadley Wickham <hadley at rice.edu>:
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 4:18 AM, Richard Ohrvall
> <richard.ohrvall at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I am new to R in general and ways to retrieve XML or JSON data in
>> particular. I have tried to get information through the XML package
>> and various websites without being able to do exactly what I want. I
>> hope someone of you can give me some help.
>>
>> I want to retrieve information about movies from IMDB or rather the
>> unofficial api, www.imdbapi.com. I have a vector with a lot movie-ids
>> according to IMDB standard. To give just a few:
>>
>> ids <-c("tt0110074", "tt0096184", "tt0081568", "tt0448134", "tt0079367")
>>
>> Now, I want to create a data frame where each of the movies refer to
>> one line and the other information is retrieved from the api. This can
>> be retrieved either as XML data or JSON data, e.g.
>>
>> JSON:
>> http://www.imdbapi.com/?i=tt0110074&tomatoes=TRUE
>>
>> XML:
>> http://www.imdbapi.com/?i=tt0110074&r=XML&tomatoes=TRUE
>>
>> Where i refer to the movie-id, i.e. the information I have in my
>> vector. They are all in the format ttXXXXXXX
>
> library(httr)
> library(rjson)
>
> fromJSON(text_content(GET("http://www.imdbapi.com/?i=tt0110074&tomatoes=TRUE")))
>
> This will be a bit easier in the next version of httr
>
> content(GET("http://www.imdbapi.com/?i=tt0110074&tomatoes=TRUE")),
>   type = "application/json")
>
> See also https://github.com/hadley/data-movies, which I suspect is a
> faster approach than using an API.
>
> Hadley
>
>
>
> --
> Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
> Department of Statistics / Rice University
> http://had.co.nz/



-- 
Richard Öhrvall
http://richardohrvall.com/
https://twitter.com/richardohrvall



More information about the R-help mailing list