In sharlagelfand/opendatatoronto: Access the City of Toronto Open Data Portal

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  message = FALSE
)

opendatatoronto is an R interface to the City of Toronto Open Data Portal. The goal of the package is to help read data directly into R without needing to manually download it via the portal.

In the portal, datasets are called packages. You can see a list of available packages by using list_packages(). This will show metadata about the package, including what topics (i.e. tags) the package covers, a description of it, any civic issues it addresses, how many resources there are (and their formats), how often it is is refreshed and when it was last refreshed.

library(opendatatoronto)

packages <- list_packages(limit = 10)

packages

Or, you can search packages by title using search_packages():

apartment_packages <- search_packages("Apartment")

apartment_packages

You can also see metadata for one specific package using show_package():

show_package("996cfe8d-fb35-40ce-b569-698d51fc683b")

Within a package, there are a number of resources - e.g. CSV, XSLX, JSON, SHP files, and more. Resources are the actual "data".

For a given package, you can get a list of resources using list_package_resources(), either by using a package found via search_packages() or list_packages():

apartment_building_registration_package <- search_packages("Apartment Building Registration")

apartment_building_registration_resources <- apartment_building_registration_package %>%
  list_package_resources()

apartment_building_registration_resources

or by passing the package's portal URL directly:

list_package_resources("https://open.toronto.ca/dataset/apartment-building-registration/")

Finally (and most usefully!), you can download the resource (i.e., the actual data) directly into R using get_resource():

library(dplyr)

apartment_building_registration_data <- apartment_building_registration_resources %>%
  filter(name == "Apartment Building Registration Data") %>%
  get_resource()

apartment_building_registration_data

The opendatatoronto package can currently handle the download of CSV, XLS/XLSX, XML, JSON, SHP, and GeoJSON resources, as well as ZIP resources that contain multiple files. For more information, see the following vignettes:

• Retrieving multi-sheet XLS/XLSX resources
• Retrieving multi-file ZIP resources
• Working with spatial data from the portal

sharlagelfand/opendatatoronto documentation built on April 12, 2025, 7:52 p.m.