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

I am pigging backing off of user1609452's answer and answering the question about non regular file hierarchies. If you have a column where some data have children and some do not, use the following:

makeList<-function(x){ 
if(ncol(x)>2){
    listSplit<-split(x[-1],x[1],drop=T)
    lapply(names(listSplit),function(y){
        if(as.character(listSplit[[y]][1,1]) > 0){
            list(name=y,children=makeList(listSplit[[y]]))
        } else {
            list(name=y,size=listSplit[[y]][1,2])
        }
        })
}else{
    lapply(seq(nrow(x[1])),function(y){list(name=x[,1][y],size=x[,2][y])})
}
}

Basically we check if the current row has more children or if it simply needs to have size appended to it.