Aaron Schlegel's Notebook of Interesting Things

The first post introduced and explored the basic usage of the PetfindeR library. In this post, we take a quick look at some of the additional uses of the library and its methods to extract data from the Petfinder database.

The goal of the PetfindeR package is to provide a simple and straightforward interface for interacting with the Petfinder API through R. The Petfinder database contains approximately 300,000 adoptable pet records and 11,000 animal welfare organization records, which makes it a handy and valuable source of data for those in the animal welfare community. However, the outputs from the Petfinder API are in messy JSON format and thus it makes it more time-consuming and often frustrating to coerce the output data into a form that is workable with R.