Python simplejson quoting for R rjson input

Question

I'm processing data within Python, and would like to stream records to R using JSON formatting and simplejson on the Python side, and rjson on the R side.

How can I output records out of Python so that R's fromJSON can process them into a one-line dataframe? Thanks

 try:
     import simplejson as json
 except ImportError:
     import json

 record = {'x':1,'y':1}
 print json.dumps( record )

Result:

 {"y": 1, "x": 1}

However, I'd need the result to be "{\"x\":1,\"y\":2}", as R needs that formatting to use the data:

 library(rjson)
 as.data.frame( fromJSON( "{\"x\":1,\"y\":2}" ) )
   x y
 1 1 2

Thanks.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 19 '13 at 18:15

Two options:

(1) If your JSON does not contain both single & double quotes, wrap the entire JSON in the quote type not being used.

(2) If you need to escape the quotes (ie, because both are in your JSON), then you need to escape the escape character. That is, use double slashes: \\"y\\"

(note that the second point applies to any string in R that has needs an escape character)

Python simplejson quoting for R rjson input

1 Answers1