IS 607 Assignment 11

For this assignment, I will use the NYT Book Reviews API to retrieve information for books written by Christa Wolf.

library(RCurl)

## Loading required package: bitops

library(rjson)

When we call the JSON data, we will first transform it into a nested list. Data for each reviewed book has is stored in its own list, so we will run a double for loop to calleach piece of data from each listed book and store it in a more convenient format - a dataframe.

callAPI <- getURL("http://api.nytimes.com/svc/books/v3/reviews.json?author=Christa%20Wolf&api-key=7d713de2214ccef5898be3e678f7ca2b:13:69774814")
jsonList <- fromJSON(callAPI) # Turn JSON data into a list
jsonList <- jsonList$results # Cut through the nested list and narrow down to the results list
christaWolf <- data.frame() #initialize dataframe

Run the loops:

for (i in 1:length(jsonList)){
  for(j in 1:length(jsonList[[1]])){
    christaWolf[i,j] <- jsonList[[i]][[j]]
  }  
}

Now we will rename the columns of our dataframe:

ourHeaders <- names(jsonList[[1]])
colnames(christaWolf) <- ourHeaders
christaWolf[,c(2,4,5,7)] # call part of data frame

##   publication_dt                                    book_title
## 1     2013-02-24 City of Angels: Or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
## 2     1982-09-06                             No Place on Earth
## 3     1984-07-31            Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays
## 4     1984-09-09            Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays
## 5     1993-03-31       The Author's Dimension: Selected Essays
##    book_author        isbn13
## 1 Christa Wolf 9780374534295
## 2 Christa Wolf 9780374222987
## 3 Christa Wolf 9780374119560
## 4 Christa Wolf 9780374119560
## 5 Christa Wolf 9780374123024