Using R to Scrape discogs

Question

I use the following in my attempt to get a list of album release from Hank Mobley, a Blue Note jazz musician:

library(magrittr);library(httr)
releasesHM<-httr::GET("https://api.discogs.com/artists/135872/releases")

This result is error free and I get 15k of data, but I can't seem to identify the content in the 10-item list that results:

Response [https://api.discogs.com/artists/135872/releases]
  Date: 2019-01-09 14:19
  Status: 200
  Content-Type: application/json
  Size: 15.7 kB

discogs says I should have the title and year of each release from this artist. Can anyone offer a solution/guidance?

Thank you!

Answer 1

The output is in JSON, so use package jsonlite to import it:

library(jsonlite)
releasesHM <- fromJSON("https://api.discogs.com/artists/135872/releases")

You'll get a list with the data.

Titles:

> head(releasesHM$releases$title)
[1] "The Max Roach Quartet Featuring Hank Mobley"
[2] "Mobley's Message"                           
[3] "Jazz Message #2"                            
[4] "The Jazz Message Of"                        
[5] "Base On Balls / Stella-Wise"                
[6] "Lower Stratosphere / Reunion" 

Artists:

> head(releasesHM$releases$artist)
[1] "The Max Roach Quartet* Featuring Hank Mobley"                                                                      
[2] "Hank Mobley"                                                                                                       
[3] "Hank Mobley"                                                                                                       
[4] "Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins, John La Porta*, Ronnie Ball, Wendell Marshall, Kenny Clarke"
[5] "Hank Mobley"                                                                                                       
[6] "Hank Mobley"