CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rjsonlite
GAURAV DIWAN
GAURAV DIWAN

Reputation: 168

Write a dictionary like string to JSON file without quotes in R

I wish to export a few strings from R into a JSON file. However, I do not want to have the quotation marks around a certain dictionary like string while exporting the file.

For example

Here are the items I am trying to write to a JSON file.

x <- c("apples", "oranges")
y <- "{'add': 'bananas'}"
z <- list("mangoes", "pears")

full_line <- c(x, y, z)

jsonlite::write_json(full_line, "output.json", pretty = T, auto_unbox = T)

I would like the string "{'add': 'bananas'}" to be written to the file output.json without quotes as follows

"apples"
"oranges"
{'add': 'bananas'}
["mangoes", "pears"]

How can I achieve this in R?

I am currently using the jsonlite package and its function write_json for this purpose.

So far I have tried putting the string inside the noquote function as well as tried cat and adding quote = F in the writeJSON function. But none of them work for my purpose.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 189

Answers (1)

IRTFM
IRTFM

Reputation: 263421

If you want to use cat you will need to make your last item into a character value rather than having it as a list, since cat does not handle lists, Then you could use sapply to run cat over the three (atomic) items with "\n" paste0-ed after each,

x <- c("apples", "oranges")
y <- "{'add': 'bananas'}"
z <- '["mangoes", "pears"]'

full_line <- c(x, y, z)

sapply( paste0(full_line, sep="\n"), cat, file="~/out.txt", append=TRUE)

If the file was empty at the beginning of the operation, then you would get this:

apples
oranges
{'add': 'bananas'}
["mangoes", "pears"]

If you wstill want double quotes around apples and oranges, then you would need to make that explicit.

Upvotes: 1

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