State.getState: Get information about a state

In pvsR: An R package to interact with the Project Vote Smart API for scientific research

Description

This function is a wrapper for the State.getState() method of the PVS API State class which grabs various data on a state. The function sends a request with this method to the PVS API for all state IDs given as a function input, extracts the XML values from the returned XML file(s) and returns them arranged in one data frame.

Usage

State.getState(stateId)

Arguments

stateId

a character string or list of character strings with the state ID(s) (see references for details)

Value

A data frame with a row for each state and columns with the following variables describing the state:
state.details.stateId,
state.details.stateType,
state.details.name,
state.details.nickName,
state.details.capital,
state.details.area,
state.details.population,
state.details.statehood,
state.details.motto,
state.details.flower,
state.details.tree,
state.details.bird,
state.details.highPoint,
state.details.lowPoint,
state.details.bicameral,
state.details.upperLegis,
state.details.lowerLegis,
state.details.ltGov,
state.details.senators,
state.details.reps,
state.details.termLimit,
state.details.termLength,
state.details.billUrl,
state.details.voteUrl,
state.details.voterReg,
state.details.primaryDate,
state.details.generalDate,
state.details.absenteeWho,
state.details.absenteeHow,
state.details.absenteeWhen,
state.details.largestCity,
state.details.rollUpper,
state.details.rollLower,
state.details.usCircuit.

Author(s)

Ulrich Matter <ulrich.matter-at-unibas.ch>

References

http://api.votesmart.org/docs/State.html
Use State.getStateIDs() to get a list of state IDs.

Examples

# First, make sure your personal PVS API key is saved as character string in the pvs.key variable:
## Not run: pvs.key <- "yourkey"
# get information about certain states
## Not run: stateinfo <- State.getState(list("FL","NY"))
## Not run: stateinfo

Example output

pvsR documentation built on May 2, 2019, 5:16 a.m.