Prevent unlist to drop NULL values

Question

I have a vector of lists and I use unlist on them. Some of the elements in the vectors are NULL and unlist seems to be dropping them.<

Answer 1

If you are dealing with a long complex JSON with several levels you should give this a try:

I extracted game log data from nba.com/stats web site. The problem is, some players have a NULL value for 3 point free throws (mostly centers) and jsonlite::fromJSON seems to handle NULL values very well:

#### Player game logs URL: one record per player per game played ####
gameLogsURL <- paste("http://stats.nba.com/stats/leaguegamelog?Counter=1000&Direction=DESC&LeagueID=00&PlayerOrTeam=P&Season=2016-17&SeasonType=Regular+Season&Sorter=PTS")

#### Import game logs data from JSON ####
# use jsonlite::fromJSON to handle NULL values
gameLogsData <- jsonlite::fromJSON(gameLogsURL, simplifyDataFrame = TRUE)
# Save into a data frame and add column names
gameLogs <- data.frame(gameLogsData$resultSets$rowSet)
colnames(gameLogs) <- gameLogsData$resultSets$headers[[1]]