more docs on creating a complex request body

[nick-youngblut]

Currently the httr vignette only shows a simple example of creating a request body:

r <- POST("http://httpbin.org/post", body = list(a = 1, b = 2, c = 3))

It would be helpful to have more complex body example, given that POST requests can require formats such as:

{
  "key1":
    [
      {
      "key1" : "value",
      "key2" : "value",
      "key3" : "value"
      }
    ]
  }

...and naively trying to create such a structure in R with any of the following approaches does not work:

# using `c()`
body = list('key1' = c(list('key1' = 'value', 'key2' = 'value', 'key3' = 'value')))

 # using `array()`
body = list('key1' = array(list('key1' = 'value', 'key2' = 'value', 'key3' = 'value')))

 # using `matrix()`
body = list('key1' = matrix(list('key1' = 'value', 'key2' = 'value', 'key3' = 'value')))

In each approach, the resulting data structure is not list(vector(list())).

The POST function docs also do not describe how to create such a data structure in R.

[hadley]

httr has been superseded in favour of httr2, so is no longer under active development. But it sounds like your issue is really about how to create JSON from an R data structure, so you may find it easier to iterate directly with jsonlite::toJSON().