In dickoa/popdata: A Client for the UNHCR Popdata Platform

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popdata

popdata is an R client for the UNHCR POPDATA platform.

Introduction

The UNHCR POPDATA platform is UNHCR internal platform for population statistics.

Installation

This package is not on yet on CRAN and to install it, you will need the remotes package. You can get popdata from Gitlab or Github (mirror)

## install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_gitlab("dickoa/popdata")

Using the popdata package

library("popdata")

popdata uses the chromote package to log into the POPDATA platform and generate all the tokens and cookies needed to connect into the platform. The packagechromote uses chrome as the default browser and if you plan to use chrome you can skip what will follow and go directly to the second point (log into the platform).

All chromium based browsers such as chromium, microsoft edge, brave, opera, vivaldi, etc. can be used but you need to tell chromote where to find them.

You can specify which browser to use by setting the CHROMOTE_CHROME environment variable to the path of the executable of your browser. The Sys.which function in R can be used on Unix system to get the path.

On Linux, to have the path to the brave browser executable, we can use the following command:

Sys.which("brave")
##            brave
## "/usr/bin/brave"

Sys.setenv("CHROMOTE_CHROME" = "/usr/bin/brave")

On Windows, to have the path to brave executable, you can use the task manager to check the path.

Sys.setenv("CHROMOTE_CHROME" = "C:\\Program Files\\BraveSoftware\\Brave-Browser\\Application/brave.exe")

On Windows, if you can download or already have chrome installed, it's much easier to use it since no setup is required (i.e no environment to set).

When you set your environment Sys.setenv, you will need to do it each time you restart R. One way to have it stored permanently is to use your .Renviron file and add the following entry:

CHROMOTE_CHROME="/usr/bin/brave"
## or
CHROMOTE_CHROME="C:\\Program Files\\BraveSoftware\\Brave-Browser\\Application/brave.exe"

The easiest way to add an entry to .Renviron, is to use the usethis package access and use usethis::edit_r_environ().

Log into POPDATA

Now that chromote can access a web browser (preferably chrome), you can use pd_login to log and store the login cookie in the package cache ($HOME/.cache/R/popdata in Unix based distribution).

pd_login()

## Check that a file was stored
pd_cache_list()
## [1] "popdata_azure_cookies.rds"

As long as you keep this rds file in the package cache and as long as you don't change your POPDATA username and password, you can keep this file to interact with popdata, no need to re-log using pd_login.

Read data directly from POPDATA

Once logged-in, you can the popdata function or one of its wrapper pd_asr, pd_mysr or pd_pf to get the data you need from POPDATA. In the first run, it will generate a session cookie that will need be updated if you inactive for a long period of time (approx. 30 min).

pd_asr(table = "refugees", year = 2019)
## No valid popdata session available, generating a session cookie...
## # A tibble: 6,214 x 30
##    asylum origin yearStartTotal yearStartTotalU… groupRecognition
##    <chr>  <chr>           <dbl>            <dbl>            <dbl>
##  1 AFG    IRN                34               34                0
##  2 AFG    IRQ                 1                1                0
##  3 AFG    PAK             72194            72194                0
##  4 ALB    ARE                 3                3                0
##  5 ALB    BUL                 1                1                0
##  6 ALB    CHI                12               12                0
##  7 ALB    COD                 3                3                0
##  8 ALB    FGU                 0                0                0
##  9 ALB    GAZ                14               14                0
## 10 ALB    IND                 0                0                0
## # … with 6,204 more rows, and 25 more variables:
## #   temporaryProtection <dbl>, individualRecognition <dbl>,
## #   resettlementArrivals <dbl>, births <dbl>,
## #   increasesOther <dbl>, increasesTotal <dbl>,
## #   decreasesVoluntaryRepatriationTotal <dbl>,
## #   decreasesVoluntaryRepatriationTotalUnhcrAssisted <dbl>,
## #   decreasesResettlementTotal <dbl>,
## #   decreasesResettlementTotalUnhcrAssisted <dbl>,
## #   cessation <dbl>, naturalization <dbl>, deaths <dbl>,
## #   decreasesOther <dbl>, decreasesTotal <dbl>,
## #   yearEndTotal <dbl>, yearEndUASCTotal <dbl>,
## #   yearEndUASC_0_4 <dbl>, yearEndUASC_5_11 <dbl>,
## #   yearEndUASC_12_14 <dbl>, yearEndUASC_0_14_total <dbl>,
## #   yearEndUASC_15_17 <dbl>, yearEndTotalUnhcrAssisted <dbl>,
## #   source <chr>, basis <chr>

You can use options(popdata_quiet = FALSE) to remove the message or use the quiet argument in any of popdata, pd_asr, pd_mysr or pd_pf.

ref <- pd_asr(table = "refugees", year = 2019, quiet = TRUE)

Meta

• Please report any issues or bugs.
• License: MIT
• Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

dickoa/popdata documentation built on March 14, 2021, 12:46 p.m.