Rectangle Nested Lists.

tibblify

The goal of tibblify is to provide an easy way to convert a nested list into a tibble.

Installation

Install the released version of tibblify from CRAN:

install.packages("tibblify")

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("wranglezone/tibblify")

Usage

To illustrate how tibblify() works, we’ll start with a list containing information about four GitHub users.

library(tibblify)
library(repurrrsive)

gh_users_small <- purrr::map(
  repurrrsive::gh_users,
  ~ .x[c("followers", "login", "url", "name", "location", "email", "public_gists")]
)

names(gh_users_small[[1]])
#> [1] "followers"    "login"        "url"          "name"         "location"    
#> [6] "email"        "public_gists"

We can rectangle gh_users_small automatically with tibblify():

tibblify(gh_users_small)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 7
#>   followers login       url                    name  location email public_gists
#>       <int> <chr>       <chr>                  <chr> <chr>    <chr>        <int>
#> 1       303 gaborcsardi https://api.github.co… Gábo… Chippen… csar…            6
#> 2       780 jennybc     https://api.github.co… Jenn… Vancouv… <NA>            54
#> 3      3958 jtleek      https://api.github.co… Jeff… Baltimo… <NA>            12
#> 4       115 juliasilge  https://api.github.co… Juli… Salt La… <NA>             4
#> 5       213 leeper      https://api.github.co… Thom… London,… <NA>            46
#> 6        34 masalmon    https://api.github.co… Maël… Barcelo… <NA>             0

We can avoid the note about the unspecified field by formally providing a spec starting with guess_tspec():

spec <- guess_tspec(gh_users_small, inform_unspecified = FALSE)
# Drop the unused email specification.
spec$fields$email <- NULL
tibblify(gh_users_small, spec = spec)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 6
#>   followers login       url                          name  location public_gists
#>       <int> <chr>       <chr>                        <chr> <chr>           <int>
#> 1       303 gaborcsardi https://api.github.com/user… Gábo… Chippen…            6
#> 2       780 jennybc     https://api.github.com/user… Jenn… Vancouv…           54
#> 3      3958 jtleek      https://api.github.com/user… Jeff… Baltimo…           12
#> 4       115 juliasilge  https://api.github.com/user… Juli… Salt La…            4
#> 5       213 leeper      https://api.github.com/user… Thom… London,…           46
#> 6        34 masalmon    https://api.github.com/user… Maël… Barcelo…            0

Learn more in vignette("tibblify").

Similar packages

• jsonlite: jsonlite::fromJSON() is excellent for parsing JSON, but tibblify allows for strict specifications and can be faster for complex nested lists.
• tidyr: tidyr::hoist() and tidyr::unnest_longer() allow for step-by-step rectangling. tibblify aims to rectangle the data in a single step based on a schema.
• rrapply: Provides extended functionality for applying functions to nested lists, and can also be used to melt or prune lists.
• tidyjson: Offers a grammar for manipulating JSON data.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the tibblify project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.