One of things that make R great is the wealth of high-quality add-on packages. As you might expect, there are many of these add-on packages with the ability to import data in a multitude of other formats. Whether it's an arcane markup-language, a proprietary binary file, excel spreadsheet, and so on, there is almost certainly an R package out there for you to handle it. But how to find them?

One way is to browse the community maintained CRAN Task Views (https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/). A task view is a way to browse for packages related to a particular topic, domain, or special interest. The germane Task View, here, is the Web Technologies Task View (https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/WebTechnologies.html). You'll notice that jsonlite and the XML package are mentioned on the first page.

The easiest way to discover these packages, though, is through your favorite web browser. For example, if you are looking for a package to import YAML data (yet another data serialization format), I might search R CRAN package yaml. If you use a search engine that tracks you (don't fight the singularity), eventually a search of only R yaml will suffice to get you where you need to go.

Developing fast and reliable information retrieval skills (like search-engine-fu) is probably one of the most valuable assets of a statistical programmer—or any programmer, for that matter. Cultivating these skills will serve you well, dear reader.