read.geo: Read and concatenate state geo files from Census ACS

In ejanalysis/ACSdownload: Obtain American Community Survey Summary File Data Tables from Census Bureau FTP Site (for EJ analysis, etc.)

Read and concatenate state geo files from Census ACS

Description

Reads and merges geo files that have been obtained from the US Census Bureau FTP site for American Community Survey (ACS) data. It uses read.fwf() at least for older years.

Usage

read.geo(
  mystates,
  folder = getwd(),
  end.year = acsdefaultendyearhere_func(),
  silent = FALSE
)

Arguments

mystates	Character vector of one or more states/DC/PR, as 2-character state abbreviations. Default is all states/DC/PR.
folder	Optional path to where files are stored, defaults to getwd()
end.year	End year of 5-year data, like "2018"
silent	Default is FALSE. Whether to send progress info to standard output.

Details

Note that if this finds the geographic file in folder already, it will not download it again even if that file was corrupt. Extracts just block group (SUMLEVEL=150) and tract (SUMLEVEL=140) geo information (not county info., since data files used in this package lack county info.) The NAME field works on pc but mac can hit an error if trying to read the NAME field. Due to encoding? specifying encoding didn't help.
(name is very long and not essential)
Error in substring(x, first, last) :
invalid multibyte string at 'onc<69>to Chapter; Navajo Nation Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land, AZ–NM–UT
Format of files is here: ftp://ftp.census.gov/acs2012_5yr/summaryfile/ACS_2008-2012_SF_Tech_Doc.pdf

Value

Returns a large data.frame of selected geographic information on all block groups and tracts in the specified states/DC/PR, with just these fields:
"STUSAB", "SUMLEVEL", "LOGRECNO", "STATE", "COUNTY", "TRACT", "BLKGRP", "GEOID"

See Also

get.acs(), download.geo()

Examples

 ## Not run: 
  geo <- read.geo( c("dc", "de") )
 
## End(Not run)

ejanalysis/ACSdownload documentation built on Jan. 18, 2025, 7:43 a.m.