How it works...

The jsonlite package provides two key functions: fromJSON and toJSON.

The fromJSON function can load data either directly from a file or from a web page, as the preceding steps 2 and 3 show. If you get errors in downloading content directly from the web, install and load the httr package.

Depending on the structure of the JSON document, loading the data can vary in complexity.

If given a URL, the fromJSON function returns a list object. In the preceding list, in step 4, we see how to extract the enclosed data frame.