Problem combining rawToChar() and write_json() - r

Question

I have a problem with rawToChar() and write_json() where my result is a .json file that includes \n and \ and cannot be viewed in a "pretty" manner using notebook+. In addition I can't unfold or Uncollapse the result.
My working sequence is:
request <- httr::GET(
url = "https://myurl",
httr::content_type("application/json")
)
existing_distribution.json = jsonlite::prettify(rawToChar(request$content))
write_json(existing_distribution.json, "distribution.json"), pretty = TRUE)
When I open distribution.json with notepad+ I get a single line ...
["{\n \"ConfigurationStatus\": \"NOT_DEFINED\",\n \"economicStatus ... blahblah \n}\n"]
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Let there be a file example.json mocking your API containing
{
"glossary": {
"title": "example glossary",
"GlossDiv": {
"title": "S",
"GlossList": {
"GlossEntry": {
"ID": "SGML",
"SortAs": "SGML",
"GlossTerm": "Standard Generalized Markup Language",
"Acronym": "SGML",
"Abbrev": "ISO 8879:1986",
"GlossDef": {
"para": "A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.",
"GlossSeeAlso": ["GML", "XML"]
},
"GlossSee": "markup"
}
}
}
}
}
This is how to read the file as a raw sequence of bytes, parses it and saves it as prettified json:
library(jsonlite)
library(readr)
read_file_raw("example.json") %>%
rawToChar() %>%
parse_json() %>%
write_json("out.json", pretty = TRUE)
Resulting in file out.json containing:
{
"glossary": {
"title": ["example glossary"],
"GlossDiv": {
"title": ["S"],
"GlossList": {
"GlossEntry": {
"ID": ["SGML"],
"SortAs": ["SGML"],
"GlossTerm": ["Standard Generalized Markup Language"],
"Acronym": ["SGML"],
"Abbrev": ["ISO 8879:1986"],
"GlossDef": {
"para": ["A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook."],
"GlossSeeAlso": [
["GML"],
["XML"]
]
},
"GlossSee": ["markup"]
}
}
}
}
}