R, printing newlines from imported text with escaped characters

Question

I am using R with jsonlite to read in a JSON file like this:

{
    "VEVENT": [
    {
        "DTSTAMP": "20150608T021037Z",
        "DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles": "20150608T173000",
        "DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles": "20150608T183000",
        "STATUS": "CONFIRMED",
        "SUMMARY": "Meeting ABC",
        "DESCRIPTION": "Line 1\nLine 2\nLine 3"
    }
    ]
}

Say I have access to the description string as the variable f, then

writelines(f) outputs Line 1\nLine 2\nLine 3. How can I modify f to output

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

What exactly is in `f`? Please make a [reproducible example](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example). Also, do you mean `writeLines()` rather than `writelines()`? If you don't have a vector, consider using `cat()` instead. — MrFlick, Jun 08 '15 at 04:20
I was unable to load your JSON string using `fromJSON()` because R complained about the carriage returns (\n). — Tim Biegeleisen, Jun 08 '15 at 04:22

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 08 '15 at 04:33

1

More info should be added, but here's a start,

x <- 'Line 1\nLine 2\nLine 3'
cat(x)
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

answered Jun 08 '15 at 04:33

Pierre L

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 08 '15 at 04:47

After dropping that text into test.json, I can do this:

library(jsonlite)
x <- data.frame(fromJSON("~/Desktop/test.json", flatten = TRUE))
cat(x$VEVENT.DESCRIPTION)

to get:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

then write to file with:

file.create("description.txt")
fileConn <- file("description.txt")
writeLines(x$VEVENT.DESCRIPTION, fileConn)

R, printing newlines from imported text with escaped characters

2 Answers2