Introduction to ProPubBills

In proPubBills: 'ProPublica' U.S. Congress Bills API Wrapper

knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE, warning=FALSE, message=FALSE)
library(httr)
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)

Usage

The ProPublica Congressional Bills package is a wrapper around the ProPublica Congressional Bills API returns a dataframe with all information within the values provided in the argument's parameters.

Arguments:

• key is the api key
• congress it the number of the congress: for example, 114 for the 114th Congres
• branch is the House or the Senate branch
• type is the type of bills; options are introduced, updated, active, passed, enacted, vetoed
• numFrom is the offset number beginning range: for example, 1 will get the first 20 bills
• numTo is the offset number to: for example, 40 will get bills 40 to 60. Entering numFrom as 1 and numTo as 40 will return bills 1 to 60

Example:

Here is an example that returns 40 bills with an "enacted date" from the 114th Congress.

getBills <- function(key,congress,branch,type,numFrom, numTo) {

  get_url <- paste('https://api.propublica.org/congress/v1/',congress, '/',branch,'/bills/',type,'.json', sep="" )

  listofdfs <- list()
  x=c()

  first_20 <-  GET(get_url,
                   add_headers(`X-API-Key` = key))

  ft_pr <- content(first_20, 'parsed')
  ft_res1 <- ft_pr$results
  ft_res2 <- ft_res1[[1]]
  ft_res3 <- ft_res2$bills

  ft_res4 <- data.frame(do.call(rbind, ft_res3), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

  for(i in numFrom:numTo) {

    if ((i %% 20) ==0) {

      url <- paste(get_url,'?offset=', i,sep="")
      r <- GET(url,
               add_headers(`X-API-Key` = key))
      pr <- content(r, 'parsed')
      t1 <- pr$results
      t2 <- t1[[1]]
      t3 <- t2$bills

      listofdfs[[i]] <- t3

      df_name <- paste("df", i, sep="_")
      assign(df_name,listofdfs[[i]])

      df1_name <- paste("df1", i, sep="_")

      assign(df1_name, data.frame(do.call(rbind, listofdfs[[i]]), stringsAsFactors=FALSE))

      x=append(x,df1_name)
    }
  }
  x1 <- do.call(rbind, mget(x))

  x2 <- rbind(ft_res4,x1)
  x3 <- lapply(x2, function(x) ifelse(x=="NULL", NA, x))

  x4 <- lapply(x3, function(x) as.character((unlist(x))))

  x5 <- as.data.frame(do.call(cbind, x4))

  return(x5)
}

house_enacted_115 <- getBills(apikey,"115","house","enacted",1,20)

proPubBills documentation built on May 2, 2019, 11:49 a.m.