CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rwebsocketsocket.io
MichaelE
MichaelE

Reputation: 837

How to connect to a socket.io from R?

I am trying to connect to a socket.io data source using R. Specifically I am trying to connect to CoinCap https://github.com/CoinCapDev/CoinCap.io.

I started by trying the websockets package from here but I could not get a connection. Maybe it is not socket.io compliant.

The best example appears to be in this post which asks the same question.

It seems the answer was to create a socket.io server as a middleman and then connect to R.

The problem is that I am not nearly as advanced as jeromefroe and have no experience with sockets or javascript and I have do not understand how the server that he created works or how to build or start it. jeromefroe provides his javascript server code in the post, and I don't know what to do with it.

I am trying to collect data in R and use for analysis. Can somebody help me get the connection running and/or help me set up the sever like jeromefroe did for the connection?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 455

Answers (1)

chinsoon12
chinsoon12

Reputation: 25223

If I understand your question correctly, you are trying to "collect data in R and use for analysis". The website provides the REST URLs and so it is a matter of doing a http GET to retrieve data. An example usage of the httr package as follows. The result retrieved is in json format. Hence, you need jsonlite package to convert into a R data structure.

library(httr)
library(jsonlite)
resp <- httr::GET("http://coincap.io/coins")
jsonlite::fromJSON(rawToChar(resp$content))

Upvotes: 1

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