Using rlist to work with nested data structures

In the previous chapter, you learned about both relational databases that store data in tables and non-relational databases that support nested data structures. In R, the most commonly used nested data structure is a list object. All previous sections focus on manipulating tabular data. In this section, let's play with the rlist package I developed, which is designed for manipulating non-tabular data.

The design of rlist is very similar to dplyr. It provides mapping, filtering, selecting, sorting, grouping, and aggregating functionality for list objects. Run the following code to install the rlist package from CRAN:

install.packages("rlist") 

We have the non-tabular version of the product data stored in data/products.json. In this file, each product has a JSON representation as follows:

{ 
    "id": "T01", 
    "name": "SupCar", 
    "type": "toy", 
    "class": "vehicle", 
    "released": true, 
    "stats"...