Nested List Parsing with jsonlite - r

Question

This is the second time that I have faced this recently, so I wanted to reach out to see if there is a better way to parse dataframes returned from jsonlite when one of elements is an array stored as a column in the dataframe as a list.
I know that this part of the power with jsonlite, but I am not sure how to work with this nested structure. In the end, I suppose that I can write my own custom parsing, but given that I am almost there, I wanted to see how to work with this data.
For example:
## options
options(stringsAsFactors=F)
## packages
library(httr)
library(jsonlite)
## setup
gameid="2015020759"
SEASON = '20152016'
BASE = "http://live.nhl.com/GameData/"
URL = paste0(BASE, SEASON, "/", gameid, "/PlayByPlay.json")
## get the data
x <- GET(URL)
## parse
api_response <- content(x, as="text")
api_response <- jsonlite::fromJSON(api_response, flatten=TRUE)
## get the data of interest
pbp <- api_response$data$game$plays$play
colnames(pbp)
And exploring what comes back:
> class(pbp$aoi)
[1] "list"
> class(pbp$desc)
[1] "character"
> class(pbp$xcoord)
[1] "integer"
From above, the column pbp$aoi is a list. Here are a few entries:
> head(pbp$aoi)
[[1]]
[1] 8465009 8470638 8471695 8473419 8475792 8475902
[[2]]
[1] 8470626 8471276 8471695 8476525 8476792 8477956
[[3]]
[1] 8469619 8471695 8473492 8474625 8475727 8476525
[[4]]
[1] 8469619 8471695 8473492 8474625 8475727 8476525
[[5]]
[1] 8469619 8471695 8473492 8474625 8475727 8476525
[[6]]
[1] 8469619 8471695 8473492 8474625 8475727 8475902
I don't really care if I parse these lists in the same dataframe, but what do I have for options to parse out the data?
I would prefer to take the data out of out lists and parse them into a dataframe that can be "related" to the original record it came from.
Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

From #hrbmstr above, I was able to get what I wanted using unnest.
select(pbp, eventid, aoi) %>% unnest() %>% head