read_json breaks for URL sources

[luisDVA]

read_json works perfectly fine for local json files but I cannot get it to read URL file paths, I get the error:

Error in readChar(path, nchars = file.info(path)$size) :
invalid 'nchars' argument

I suspect the function might read a patch similar to this one:
https://github.com/rstudio/profvis/blob/master/R/file_contents.R

thanks!

[colearendt]

It seems the plan is to revamp the read_json function here, as that is definitely an unhelpful error.

In any case, jsonlite::fromJSON works fine with URL sources, and that is what as.tbl_json calls behind the scenes. I.e. I recommend the following:

devtools::install_github('jeremystan/tidyjson')
library(tidyjson)

## 'http://url/to/my/json' %>% as.tbl_json()

## most verbs call as.tbl_json() behind the scenes too

"http://citibikenyc.com/stations/json" %>% json_types()
#> # A tbl_json: 1 x 2 tibble with a "JSON" attribute
#>       `attr(., "JSON")` document.id   type
#>                   <chr>       <int> <fctr>
#> 1 "{\"executionTime..."           1 object