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

Using a combination of split and subset may get what you want. For example

library(RJSONIO)
list1<-split(subset(MyData,select=c(-Location)),Mydata$Location)
list2<-lapply(list1,function(x){split(subset(x,select=c(-Station)),x$Station,drop=TRUE)})
list3<-lapply(list2,function(x){lapply(x,function(y){split(subset(y,select=c(-Size,-ID)),y$Size,drop=TRUE)})})
jsonOut<-toJSON(list(MyData=list3))
jsonOut1<-gsub('([^\n]*?): \\{\n "Percentage"','\\{"name":\\1,"Percentage"',jsonOut)
jsonOut2<-gsub('"([^"]*?)": \\{','"name":"\\1","children":\\{',jsonOut1)

cat(jsonOut2)
{
 "name":"MyData","children":{
 "name":"Alpha","children":{
 "name":"Yota","children":{
{"name": "Big","Percentage":   0.85 
},
{"name":"Medium","Percentage":   0.19 
},
{"name":"small","Percentage":   0.89 
} 
},
"name":"Zeta","children":{
{"name": "Big","Percentage":   0.63 
},
{"name":"Medium","Percentage":   0.43 
},
{"name":"small","Percentage":   0.47 
} 
} 
},
"name":"Beta","children":{
 "name":"Meta","children":{
{"name": "Big","Percentage":   0.89 
},
{"name":"Medium","Percentage":   0.71 
},
{"name":"small","Percentage":   0.59 
} 
},
"name":"Theta","children":{
{"name": "Big","Percentage":   0.09 
},
{"name":"Medium","Percentage":   0.33 
},
{"name":"small","Percentage":   0.79 
} 
} 
} 
} 
}