Creating a corpus out of texts stored in JSON files in R

I have several JSON files with texts in grouped into date, body and title. As an example consider:

{"date": "December 31, 1990, Monday, Late Edition - Final", "body": "World stock markets begin 1991 facing the threat of a war in the Persian Gulf, recessions or economic slowdowns around the world, and dismal earnings -- the same factors that drove stock markets down sharply in 1990.  Finally, there is the problem of the Soviet Union, the wild card in everyone's analysis. It is a country whose problems could send stock markets around the world reeling if something went seriously awry. With Russia about to implode, that just adds to the risk premium, said Mr. Dhar. LOAD-DATE: December 30, 1990 ", "title": "World Markets;"}
{"date": "December 30, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final", "body": "DATELINE: CHICAGO Gleaming new tractors are becoming more familiar sights on America's farms. Sales and profits at the three leading United States tractor makers -- Deere & Company, the J.I. Case division of Tenneco Inc. and the Ford Motor Company's Ford New Holland division -- are all up, reflecting renewed agricultural prosperity after the near-depression of the early and mid-1980's. But the recovery in the tractor business, now in its third year, is fragile.  Tractor makers hope to install computers that can digest this information, then automatically concentrate the application of costly fertilizer and chemicals on the most productive land. Within the next 15 years, that capability will be commonplace, predicted Mr. Ball. LOAD-DATE: December 30, 1990 ", "title": "All About/Tractors;"}

I have three different newspapers with separate files containing all the texts produced for the period 1989 - 2016. My ultimate goal is to combine all the texts into a single corpus. I have done it in Python using the pandas library and I am wondering if it could be done in R similarly. Here is my code with the loop in R:

for (i in 1989:2016){
  df0 = pd.DataFrame([json.loads(l) for l in open('NYT_%d.json' % i)])
  df1 = pd.DataFrame([json.loads(l) for l in open('USAT_%d.json' % i)])
  df2 = pd.DataFrame([json.loads(l) for l in open('WP_%d.json' % i)])
  appended_data.append(df0)
  appended_data.append(df1)
  appended_data.append(df2)
}

Solution

There many options in R to read json file and convert them to a data.frame/data.table.

Here one using jsonlite and data.table:

library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
res <- lapply(1989:2016,function(i){
  ff <- c('NYT_%d.json','USAT_%d.json' ,'WP_%d.json')
  list_files_paths <- sprintf(ff,i)
  rbindlist(lapply(list_files_paths,fromJSON))
  })

Here res is a list of data.table. If you want to aggregate all data.table in a single data.table:

  rbindlist(res)