README.md

In jdemello/valetr: Interface to Bank of Canada's 'Valet' API

valetr

valetr provides an interface to the Bank of Canada’s ‘Valet’ API —read the API’s terms and condtions. Some of the data available include key monetary policy variables —i.e. Total CPI and M aggregates.

‘Valet’ also provides a route to Foreign Exchange Rates in RSS. This route returns the most recent foreign exchange rate —one observation only. This functionality is not included in valetr.

Retrieve key monetary policy variables

The ‘Valet’ API houses key monetary policy variables series. For instance, it is possible to extract the series for some measures of core inflation:

# getSeriesInfo will return a data.frame with the series info (including link and name)
cpiInfo <- getSeriesInfo(patternGroupLabel = "consumer price index$",
              patternSeriesLabel = "trim|median|common|total cpi$",  
                ignore.case=TRUE)

# now use the series'  link or name to feed getSerieData
# note that getSeriesData accepts multilpe links or names
cpis <- getSeriesData(series=cpiInfo[["series_link"]]) # can also use cpiInfo[["series_name"]]

Note that getSeriesData() allows for the API’s query functionality:

cpis <- getSeriesData(series=cpiInfo[["series_link"]], start_date="2008-07-01", end_date="2012-07-01")
# cpis <- getSeriesData(series=cpiInfo[["series_link"]], recent_years=12L) # last 12 yrs
# cpis <- getSeriesData(series=cpiInfo[["series_link"]], recent_months=12L) # last 12 months
# cpis <- getSeriesData(series=cpiInfo[["series_link"]], recent_weeks=12L) # last 12 weeks
# cpis <- getSeriesData(series=cpiInfo[["series_link"]], recent=12L) # last 12 obs

Note that only start_date and end_date can be used together as query parameters.

Obtain exchange rate series

You can also retrieve foreign exchange rate series:

fxInfo <- getSeriesInfo(patternGroupLabel = "monthly exchange",
              patternSeriesLabel = "(EUR|GBP|USD)\\/CAD",  
                ignore.case=TRUE)

# now use the series'  link or name to feed getSerieData
# note that getSeriesData accepts multilpe links or names
fx <- getSeriesData(series=fxInfo[["series_link"]]) # can also use fx[["series_name"]]

Installation

valetr version 0.1.0 is now on CRAN:

install.packages("valetr")

You can also install the development version:

devtools::install_github("jdemello/valetr")

Functions

regexSeriesLabel  Matches a `pattern` to the label of one or more series.
                  Returns a `data.frame` with label, link and name

getSeriesInfo     Allows to pattern-match both group and series labels. 
                  This function returns a `data.frame` with a more 
                  complete description of a series. It includes their 
                  group information (name, label, desc.) as well as 
                  the series descriptive components

getSeriesData     Extracts one or more series by specifying their name 
                  or link --vector can contain a mix of both. It also 
                  allows the insertion of the API's query parameters.

Read more about the API here.

jdemello/valetr documentation built on Nov. 4, 2019, 2:35 p.m.