Overview

I created the same table in three different file types, html, json, and xml. The table contains the Title, Author, Year, and Genre of three particular books. I then loaded the individual files into R as data frames.

pacman::p_load(XML, jsonlite)
books_html <- readHTMLTable('books.html')[[1]]
books_html
##                      Title           Author Year       Genre
## 1 Finding the Winning Edge       Bill Walsh 1997   Biography
## 2 The Education of a Coach David Halberstam 2005   Biography
## 3               The League     David Harris 1986 Non-Fiction
books_json <- fromJSON('books.json')
books_json
##                      Title           Author Year       Genre
## 1 Finding the Winning Edge       Bill Walsh 1997   Biography
## 2 The Education of a Coach David Halberstam 2005   Biography
## 3               The League     David Harris 1986 Non-Fiction
books_xml <- xmlToDataFrame('books.xml')
books_xml
##                      Title           Author Year       Genre
## 1 Finding the Winning Edge       Bill Walsh 1997   Biography
## 2 The Education of a Coach David Halberstam 2005   Biography
## 3               The League     David Harris 1986 Non-Fiction

Text Files

html file

json file

xml file

Conclusion

All three of the data frames are identical. Since I created them by hand with the same exact structure, it makes sense that they are identical.