R/createCleanCensusDF.R

In RubyFore/CensusAPITools:

#' @export
#' @title Tidies and downloads Census data
#' @param url a URL generated from createCensusURL
#' @param varNames a string or vector of strings
#' @param tracts a logical corresponding to whether data is being downloaded at the tract level
#' @description create a clean dataset from the Census API using a URL generated in a createCensusURl.
#' @return a dataframe

createCleanCensusDF <- function(url, varNames='', tracts=FALSE) {
  data <- jsonlite::fromJSON(url)
  data <- as.data.frame(data[-1,], stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

  if (tracts == FALSE) {
    names(data) <- c(varNames, 'state', 'county')
    for (i in 1:(ncol(data)-2)) {
      data[[i]] <- as.numeric(data[[i]])
    }
    # Adding a column that corresponds to the unique Geographic region identifiers
    # in the tigris dataset
    data$GEOID <- paste0(data$state, data$county)
  } else {
    names(data) <- c(varNames, 'state', 'county', 'tract')
    for (i in 1:(ncol(data) -3)) {
      data[[i]] <- as.numeric(data[[i]])
    }
    data$GEOID <- paste0(data$state, data$county, data$tract)
  }
  return(data)
}