listviewer

Last week’s 

exportwidget

 got almost
no love, so I’m hoping this one finds a loving home. I have not been able to stop using it, since the first hour of creation, so it has quickly become a key component in my workflow.

With a tweet, Jennifer Bryan inspired this widget. Nested data gets messy, inscrutable, and difficult to follow very
quickly. 

lists

 and 

environments

 in R are the primary source of this nested data. Often, an interactive visual look provides
the insight and understanding one needs. 

listviewer

gives us this view with just one line of code. We can use it to inspect 

htmlwidgets

 or 

lattice

plots
or 

par()

 settings or your 

.GlobalEnv

.

Thanks so much to the Jos de Jong, the author of 

jsoneditor

 on
which 

listviewer

 relies for all its awesomeness. If you look at the source of 

listviewer

, you will notice how little code
I had to write to wrap this as an 

htmlwidget

.

Quick Installation

As with almost all widgets posted here, 

listviewer

 is not on CRAN, so for now please install with

devtools::install_github

.
Given enough interest, I’m happy to put in the effort to make this or any others CRAN-worthy. Just let me know.

devtools::install_github(c(
'jeroenooms/jsonlite'
, 'rstudio/shiny'
, 'ramnathv/htmlwidgets'
))

Examples

What’s my 

par

?

When I first learned 

R

 I struggled with all the stuff in 

par()

. Let’s see if this makes a little more sense.

library(listviewer)

jsonedit( par() )

What’s in my 

lattice

?

lattice

 plots become 

trellis

 objects. Let’s peek inside. If you’re thinking let’s do the same with

ggplot2

,
you’ll need to write a little more code to handle 

S3

, 

S4

, and 

environments

.

library(lattice)
library(listviewer)

jsonedit(
xyplot( y~x, data.frame( x = 1:10, y = 1:10 ), type = "b" )
)

What’s in my 

broom

?

David Robinson’s 

broom

 package tidies up our messy data in 

R

.
Let’s see the difference with

jsonedit

.

jsonedit(
list(
"messy" = lm(mpg~factor(cyl),mtcars)
,"broom" = list(
"tidy" = broom::tidy(lm(mpg~factor(cyl),mtcars))
,"augment" = broom::augment(lm(mpg~factor(cyl),mtcars))
)
)
)

What’s in my 

htmlwidget

?

I hope you can see some of the power of this 

htmlwidget

. As a final example, let’s go meta and

jsonedit

 our 

jsonedit

.

library(listviewer)

jsonedit(jsonedit())

Shiny?

listviewer

 sort of works with 

Shiny

. 

modify

 and 

save

 for 

listviewer

 is
the next frontier. See the 

Readme.md

.

Thanks

Thanks so much

jsoneditor

 from Jos de Jong
Ramnath Vaidyanathan and RStudio for 

htmlwidgets

all the contributors to 

R

 and 

JavaScript