NEWS.md

In nealrichardson/acs: Download, Manipulate, and Present American Community Survey and Decennial Data from the US Census

What's changed

New features

• Allow setting API key in options (and thus in .Rprofile) under 'census.api.key'. Add helper function api.key.load to wrap usage of "extdata/key.rda" throughout and to handle the dual key locations. Removed "file" argument to api.key.install because none of the places that loaded the key looked anywhere other than "extdata/key.rda".
• If the Census API query fails, the error message that the API returns is now printed in the error message instead of a generic "no data was found". Helpful for debugging when queries don't work as expected.

Fixes

• Fix querying of 1990 census, which fails if "NAME" is specified as a variable; it uses "ANPSADPI" instead
• Allow querying all counties (for=county:*) without requiring a state. 2015 ACS at least supports this geography.
• Performance improvements to parsing results in acs.fetch
• Stop on validation checks rather than warning and returning NA, which often just errored further downstream where NA was an invalid input.

Internal

• Code linting using formatR and reorganization into multiple files
• Moved 'Depends:' packages to 'Imports:'
• Remove dependency on 'RCurl' in favor of httr/, and take advantage of query caching in httpcache. Use httptest to allow test running without hitting the Census API.

nealrichardson/acs documentation built on May 23, 2019, 1:30 p.m.