In rOpenGov/rtimes: Client for New York Times 'APIs'

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rtimes vignette - R client for New York Times APIs

About the package

rtimes is an R package to search and retrieve data from the New York Times congress API.

Functions in rtimes that wrap these APIs are prefixed by two letter acronyms fo reach API + the function name itself, e.g.: cg + fxn

• cg for the Congress API
• as for the Article Search API
• cf for the Campaign Finance API
• geo for the Geographic API

Please get your own API keys at https://developer.nytimes.com/ - you can use one API key for all their APIs.

I set up the functions so that you can put the key in your .Renviron file, which will be called on startup of R, and then you don't have to enter your API key for each run of a function. Add entries for an R session like

Sys.setenv(NYTIMES_API_KEY = "YOURKEYHERE")
Sys.setenv(PROPUBLICA_API_KEY = "YOURKEYHERE")

Or set them across sessions by putting entries in your .Renviron file like

NYTIMES_API_KEY=<yourkey>
PROPUBLICA_API_KEY=<yourkey>

You can also pass in your key in a function call, but be careful not to expose your keys in code committed to public repositories. If you do pass in a function call, use e.g., Sys.getenv("NYTIMES_API_KEY").

Install rtimes

From CRAN

install.packages("rtimes")

Development version from GitHub

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ropengov/rtimes")

Load rtimes

library('rtimes')

Note: Member ID S001181 is Jeanne Shaheen

Congress API

Bill cosponsorship data for a member

out <- cg_billscosponsor(memberid='S001181', type='cosponsored')
out$data

Member appearances

out <- cg_memberappear(memberid='S001181')
out$data

Article search API

This function in most cases outputs a series of S3 objects, one for each item found. Each element, an object of class as_search, is a summary of a list of data. You can unclass() the object if you want, or index into particular elements (see egs below).

Here, we search for bailout between two dates, Oct 1 2008 and Dec 1 2008

res <- as_search(q="bailout", begin_date = "20081001", end_date = '20081201')
res$copyright
res$meta
res$data

Sys.sleep(3)

Another e.g., Search for keyword money, within the Sports and Foreign news desks

res <- as_search(q = "money", fq = 'news_desk:("Sports" "Foreign")')
res$data

Campaign Finance API

Here, we search for campaign details for the 2008 cycle, with FEC ID number P80003338

cf_candidate_details(campaign_cycle = 2008, fec_id = 'P80003338')

Geographic API

The geographic API allows you to do geo based searches of place names. It's built on the Geonames database.

Here, we search for results for locations in the US

geo_search(country_code = 'US')

rOpenGov/rtimes documentation built on July 21, 2019, 3:19 a.m.