Although it's great that we can read HTML tables, CSV files and JSON and XML data, and even parse raw HTML documents to store some parts of those in a dataset, there is no sense in spending too much time developing custom tools until we have no other option. First, always start with a quick look on the Web Technologies and Services CRAN Task View; also search R-bloggers, StackOverflow, and GitHub for any possible solution before getting your hands dirty with custom XPath selectors and JSON list magic.
Let's do this for our previous examples by searching for Socrata, the Open Data Application Program Interface of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Yes, there is a package for that:
> library(RSocrata) Loading required package: httr Loading required package: RJSONIO Attaching package: 'RJSONIO' The following objects are masked from 'package:rjson': fromJSON, toJSON