How to write to json with children from R

Question

I want to turn an R data.frame into a JSON object in order to use it for preparing data visualizations with d3.js. I found a lot of questions that asked how to get JSON into

Answer 1

This is a recursive approach which is cleaner:

require(RJSONIO)

makeList<-function(x){
  if(ncol(x)>2){
    listSplit<-split(x[-1],x[1],drop=T)
    lapply(names(listSplit),function(y){list(name=y,children=makeList(listSplit[[y]]))})
  }else{
    lapply(seq(nrow(x[1])),function(y){list(name=x[,1][y],Percentage=x[,2][y])})
  }
}


jsonOut<-toJSON(list(name="MyData",children=makeList(MyData[-1])))
cat(jsonOut)