Unexpected character json error in r

Question

I\'m getting the following error message for this code intended to read Instagram posts into r. Other code is successfully reading in the first 20 posts, but Instagram want

Answer 1

I can reproduce your problem by extending your code snippet with code that extracts next_url from the pagination object in the JSON response returned by Instagram.

When using rjson::fromJSON to parse the JSON response I get errors like

Error in rjson::fromJSON(js) : unexpected character: i

However, using RJSONIO::fromJSON for parsing the exact same string works just fine! Also the string validates as correct JSON with online JSON validators.

This strongly points to a bug in rjson::fromJSON. You may want to use the RJSONIO package instead for now.

Unfortunately these Instagram replies are quite large. I'll see if I can strip down the JSON output to something manageable so I can post details here. (I'm trying to avoid having to link to data on an external site.)

I suspect an encoding issue with Instagram user names.

Answer 2

Using RJSONSIO and Rcpp, you should be able to get what you want from:

media1 <- fromJSON(getURL(paste(url,token,sep="")
next_url <- media1$pagination[1]
media2 <- fromJSON(getURL(next_url))

No need to specify additional arguments in fromJSON()