Working with tibbles

library(opioidLit)

Introduction

Data requests to the OIDA API are returned as tibbles. Tibbles are special data structures that allow for lists to be nested within the column of a data frame. The tibble package is required to create and work with tibbles.

#install.packages("tibble")
library(tibble)
vignette(package = "tibble")

Rectangling tibbles

Extracting list elements from a tibble column is informally known as “rectangling.” The process requires patience and vignettes are available for assistance.

#install.packages("tidyr")
#install.packages("dplyr")
#install.packages("repurrrsive")
#load packages
library(tidyr)
library(dplyr)
library(repurrrsive)
#load vignette in help window
vignette("rectangle", package = "tidyr")

Flattening tibbles

A user may choose to work with the tibble or flatten the file to a tabular form like the more traditional and ubiquitous data frame. There are at least two choices: (1) purrr::flatten or (2) jsonlite::flatten.

#install.packages("purrr")
library(purrr)
help("flatten", package = "purrr")

#install.packages("jsonlite")
library(jsonlite)
help("flatten", package = "jsonlite")

Reference

Hadley Wickham and Garret Grolemund (2017). R for Data Science-Tibbles, O’Reilly Media.