Parsing back to 'messy' API strcuture
- by Eric Fail
I'm fetching data from an online database (REDcap) via API and the data gets delivered in as comma separated string like this,
RAW.API <- structure("id,event_arm,name,dob,pushed_text,pushed_calc,complete\n\"01\",\"event_1_arm_1\",\"John\",\"1979-05-01\",\"\",\"\",2\n\"01\",\"event_2_arm_1\",\"John\",\"2012-09-02\",\"abc\",\"123\",1\n\"01\",\"event_3_arm_1\",\"John\",\"2012-09-10\",\"\",\"\",2\n\"02\",\"event_1_arm_1\",\"Mary\",\"1951-09-10\",\"def\",\"456\",2\n\"02\",\"event_2_arm_1\",\"Mary\",\"1978-09-12\",\"\",\"\",2\n", "`Content-Type`" = structure(c("text/html", "utf-8"), .Names = c("", "charset")))
I have this script that nicely parses it into a data frame,
(df <- read.table(file = textConnection(RAW.API), header = TRUE,
sep = ",", na.strings = "", stringsAsFactors = FALSE))
id event_arm name dob pushed_text pushed_calc complete
1 1 event_1_arm_1 John 1979-05-01 <NA> NA 2
2 1 event_2_arm_1 John 2012-09-02 abc 123 1
3 1 event_3_arm_1 John 2012-09-10 <NA> NA 2
4 2 event_1_arm_1 Mary 1951-09-10 def 456 2
5 2 event_2_arm_1 Mary 1978-09-12 <NA> NA 2
I then do some calculations and write them to pushed_text and pushed_calc whereafter I need to format the data back to the messy comma separated structure it came in.
I imagine something like this,
API.back <- `some magic command`(df, ...)
identical(RAW.API, API.back)
[1] TRUE
Some command that can format my data from the data frame I made, df, back to the structure that the raw API-object came in, RAW.API.
Any help would be very appreciated.
