In q-w-a/regulationsgov: Accessing Regulations.gov Data

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  fig.path = "man/figures/README-",
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library(regulationsgov)

regulationsgov

The package regulationsgov is designed to enable users to access and engage with textual data from the Regulations.gov API.

Installation

You can install the development version of regulationsgov from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
remotes::install_github("q-w-a/regulationsgov")

First Steps

To access the Regulations.gov API, you will need to obtain an API key here.

Once you have this key, you can provide it to every time you call one of the functions requiring authentication using the key argument, but it may be easiest to set it up as an environmental variable. You can do this with the following function.

library(regulationsgov)

set_datagov_key("PUT_KEY_HERE")

If you run set_datagov_key, you don't need to provide the key as an argument to functions in this package. You only need to run it once. However, if you choose to not set it up, you can just provide the key to the functions requiring authentication.

Example: Retrieving Comments for a Specific Docket

For example, here we retrieve all comment metadata, including the download links, for the docket CMS-2014-0063. First, we do so assuming we have set up the key. See the Obtaining Data vignette for more information on how to use the endpoint argument.

# retrieve all comments for the docket CMS-2014-0063
comments_CMS_2014_0063 <- get_all_comments(endpoint = "document",
                                           docketId = "CMS-2014-0063")

If the key is not set up, then we provide the key with the key argument. Here, you need to replace DEMO_KEY with your specific key unless you are running a very limited number of calls (the rate limit for DEMO_KEY is much lower than an ordinary API key).

# retrieve all comments for the docket CMS-2014-0063
comments_CMS_2014_0063 <- get_all_comments(endpoint = "document",
                                           docketId = "CMS-2014-0063", 
                                           key = "DEMO_KEY")

After running this command, if needed you can access it as an environmental variable with

Sys.getenv("DATA_GOV_KEY")

but this will likely be unnecessary for use of the functions in this package.

Example: Retrieving the Documents Associated with a Specific Docket

Here, we obtain document and metadata for all documents associated with the docket FDA-2009-N-0501.

library(dplyr)

documents <- regulationsgov::get_all_documents(
  docketId = "FDA-2009-N-0501")


str(documents)

Example: Retrieving the Comments Associated with a Specific Docket

In this case, there are only 13 comments associated with docket FDA-2009-N-0501. We can obtain them with the function get_all_comments. You might notice the same individual has submitted multiple comments, which we also can verify here.

comments <- regulationsgov::get_all_comments(endpoint = "document",
                                             docketId ="FDA-2009-N-0501")

comments %>%
  select(data_id, 
         data_title,
         data_stateProvinceRegion) %>%
  str()

Of particular interest may be the fileUrl column, which allows us to download the text.

For example, to download any attachments for the comments and place them in the directory comments_FDA_2009_N_0501, we can run

download_all(data_frame = comments, 
             dest = "../comments_FDA_2009_N_0501", 
             quiet = TRUE)

and to download the documents themselves to the directory docs_FDA_2009_N_0501 we can run the following.

download_all(data_frame = documents, 
             dest = "../docs_FDA_2009_N_0501", 
             quiet = TRUE)

If we don't want to download the text but instead want the text included in the data frame, you can use the add_text function. This function adds a column text where each entry contains all the processed text from any attachments for that document or comment.

comments <- add_text(comments)

comments %>%
  select(data_id, 
         data_comment,
         text) %>%
  str()

q-w-a/regulationsgov documentation built on May 3, 2022, 8:23 p.m.