Get XML or JSON data from api into data frame

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 4:18 AM, Richard Ohrvall
<richard.ohrvall at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear all,

I am new to R in general and ways to retrieve XML or JSON data in
particular. I have tried to get information through the XML package
and various websites without being able to do exactly what I want. I
hope someone of you can give me some help.

I want to retrieve information about movies from IMDB or rather the
unofficial api, www.imdbapi.com. I have a vector with a lot movie-ids
according to IMDB standard. To give just a few:

ids <-c("tt0110074", "tt0096184", "tt0081568", "tt0448134", "tt0079367")

Now, I want to create a data frame where each of the movies refer to
one line and the other information is retrieved from the api. This can
be retrieved either as XML data or JSON data, e.g.

JSON:
http://www.imdbapi.com/?i=tt0110074&tomatoes=TRUE

XML:
http://www.imdbapi.com/?i=tt0110074&r=XML&tomatoes=TRUE

Where i refer to the movie-id, i.e. the information I have in my
vector. They are all in the format ttXXXXXXX

library(httr)
library(rjson)

fromJSON(text_content(GET("http://www.imdbapi.com/?i=tt0110074&tomatoes=TRUE")))

This will be a bit easier in the next version of httr

content(GET("http://www.imdbapi.com/?i=tt0110074&tomatoes=TRUE")),
  type = "application/json")

See also https://github.com/hadley/data-movies, which I suspect is a
faster approach than using an API.

Hadley



--
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/