Expanding a JSON column in R - json

Question

I am reading in a data table from a CSV file. Some elements in the CSV are in JSON format, so one of the columns has JSON formatted data, for example:
user_id tv_sec action_info
1: 47074 1426791420 {"foo": {"bar":12345,"baz":309}, "type": "type1"}
2: 47074 1426791658 {"foo": '{"bar":23409,"baz":903}, "type": "type2"}
3: 47074 1426791923 {"foo": {"bar":97241,"baz":218}, "type": "type3"}
I would like to flatten out the action_info column and add the data as columns, as follows:
user_id tv_sec bar baz type
1: 47074 1426791420 12345 309 type1
2: 47074 1426791658 23409 903 type2
3: 47074 1426791923 97241 218 type3
I am not sure how to achieve this. I found a library to convert strings to JSON in R (RJSONIO) but I'm having a hard time figuring out what to do next. When I experiment with just trying to convert all rows in the action_info column to JSON with the command userActions[,.(fromJSON(action_info))] I basically get a data table with what seems like all the values accumulated in some way that's not entirely clear to me. For example, running that with my (non-example) data I get:
V1
1: 2.188603e+12,2.187628e+12,2.186202e+12,1.164000e+03
2: type1
Warning messages:
1: In if (is.na(encoding)) return(0L) :
the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used
2: In if (is.na(i)) { :
the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used
So, I'm trying to figure out:
how to operate on the column to convert it from JSON to values (I think I am doing this correctly though, but I'm not certain)
how to get the values and create columns out of them in either the current or new data table.

Answer 1

Rather ugly but should work:
library(dplyr)
library(data.table)
lapply(as.character(df$action_info), RJSONIO::fromJSON) %>%
lapply(function(e) list(bar=e$foo[1], baz=e$foo[2], type=e$type)) %>%
rbindlist() %>%
cbind(df) %>%
select(-action_info)

Answer 2

Data:
library(data.table)
df <- data.table(structure(list(user_id = c(47074L, 47074L, 47074L), tv_sec = c(1426791420L,
1426791658L, 1426791923L), action_info = c("{\"foo\": {\"bar\":12345,\"baz\":309}, \"type\": \"type1\"}",
"{\"foo\": {\"bar\":23409,\"baz\":903}, \"type\": \"type2\"}",
"{\"foo\": {\"bar\":97241,\"baz\":218}, \"type\": \"type3\"}"
)), .Names = c("user_id", "tv_sec", "action_info"), row.names = c(NA,
-3L), class = "data.frame"))
Here's one way to do it with data_table:
df[, c('bar', 'baz', 'type'):=as.list(unlist(fromJSON(action_info[1]))),
by=action_info]
How it works:
The by=action_info essentially makes sure we just call fromJSON once per unique action_info (once per row in your case); this is because fromJSON doesn't work on vectorised input.
The fromJSON(action_info[1]) converts the action_info to JSON (the [1] is on the off chance that you have multiple rows with the same action_info since fromJSON doesn't work on vector input).
The unlist flattens the nested "foo: {bar...}" (do fromJSON(df$action_info[1]) and unlist(fromJSON(df$action_info[1])) to see what I mean).
The as.list converts the result back into a list, with one element per "column" (data.table needs this to do the multiple assignment)
Then the c('bar', 'baz', 'type'):= assigns the output back out to the columns.
Note we don't match by name, so 'bar' is always the first part of the JSON, 'baz' is always the second, etc. If your action_info could have a {bar: ..., baz: ...} as well as a {baz: ..., bar: ...} the baz of the second will be assigned to the bar column. If you want to be cleverer and assign by name, you will have to think of something cleverer (for you could do as.list(...)[c('foo.bar', 'foo.baz', 'type')] to ensure the elements are in the right order before assigning).