R Cannot Open Connection`

Question

I am scraping from the NBA.com API for some shots data. The url that I am using is

url = "stats.nba.com/stats/shotchartdetail?CFID=33&CFPARAMS=2017-18&ContextFilter=&ContextMeasure=FGA&DateFrom=&DateTo=&GameID=&GameSegment=&LastNGames=0&LeagueID=00&Location=&MeasureType=Base&Month=0&OpponentTeamID=0&Outcome=&PaceAdjust=N&PerMode=PerGame&Period=0&PlayerID=101107&PlusMinus=N&PlayerPosition=&Rank=N&RookieYear=&Season=2017-18&SeasonSegment=&SeasonType=Regular%20Season&TeamID=0&VsConference=&VsDivision="

This website can be easily verified to exist by copying and pasting into your browser. However, when I enter the line

data = rjson::fromJSON(file = url)

I get the error: Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection ... HTTP status was '403 Forbidden'.

I have tried adding http and https to the url but to no avail. Why is R not reading this url that clearly exists?

Cristian E. Nuno · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-14T15:04:34.153

Overview

You need to download the data into r and then import that .json file inside of fromJSON(). I've shown how to go about extracting the two data frames contained in the list object marvin.williams.shot.data:

Marvin William's individual 2017-2018 shot data; and
NBA league average shot data from the 2017-2018 season.

Reproducible Example

# load necessary packages
library( jsonlite )

# load necessary data
download.file( url = "http://stats.nba.com/stats/shotchartdetail?CFID=33&CFPARAMS=2017-18&ContextFilter=&ContextMeasure=FGA&DateFrom=&DateTo=&GameID=&GameSegment=&LastNGames=0&LeagueID=00&Location=&MeasureType=Base&Month=0&OpponentTeamID=0&Outcome=&PaceAdjust=N&PerMode=PerGame&Period=0&PlayerID=101107&PlusMinus=N&PlayerPosition=&Rank=N&RookieYear=&Season=2017-18&SeasonSegment=&SeasonType=Regular%20Season&TeamID=0&VsConference=&VsDivision="
               , destfile = "stats_nba.json" )

# transfrom into data frame
marvin.williams.shot.data <- 
  fromJSON( txt = "stats_nba.json" )

# view results
lapply( X = marvin.williams.shot.data, FUN = class)
# $resource
# [1] "character"
# 
# $parameters
# [1] "list"
# 
# $resultSets
# [1] "data.frame"

# transfrom the matrix into a data frame
player.shotchart.df <-
  as.data.frame( marvin.williams.shot.data$resultSets$rowSet[[1]]
                 , stringsAsFactors = FALSE )

# assign colnames
colnames( player.shotchart.df ) <-
  marvin.williams.shot.data$resultSets$headers[[1]]

# view results
dim( player.shotchart.df ) # [1] 563  24

# transfrom the matrix into a data frame
league.average.df <-
  as.data.frame( marvin.williams.shot.data$resultSets$rowSet[[2]]
                 , stringsAsFactors = FALSE )

# assign colnames
colnames( league.average.df ) <-
  marvin.williams.shot.data$resultSets$headers[[2]]

# view results
dim( league.average.df ) # [1] 20  7

# end of script #

R Cannot Open Connection`

1 Answers1

Overview

Reproducible Example