In slu-openGIS/censusxy: Access the U.S. Census Bureau's Geocoding API System

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censusxy

The censusxy package is designed to provide easy access to the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoding Tools in R. censusxy has also been developed specifically with large data sets in mind - only unique addresses are passed to the API for geocoding. If a data set exceeds 1,000 unique addresses, it will be automatically subset into appropriately sized API calls, geocoded, and then put back together so that a single object is returned. There is also support for parallel processing of requests, which can significantly shorten the time it takes to batch geocode large numbers of addresses.

censusxy is described in a 2021 paper in Transactions in GIS by Chris and Branson - please cite the paper if you use censusxy in your work!

Current Development Status

While the current, core functionality still works, changes in the Census API caused consistent issues with our unit tests, prompting us to remove the package from CRAN. As of early 2025, there is no active development planned for censusxy.

Installation

Installing censusxy

The easiest way to get censusxy is to install it from CRAN:

install.packages("censusxy")

Alternatively, the development version of censusxy can be accessed from GitHub with remotes:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("chris-prener/censusxy")

Installing Suggested Dependencies

Since the package does not need sf for its basic functionality, it is a suggested dependency rather than a required one. However, many users will want to map these data as sf objects, and we therefore recommend users install sf. Windows and macOS users should be able to install sf without significant issues unless they are building from source. Linux users will need to install several open source spatial libraries to get sf itself up and running.

If you want to use these sf, you can either install it individually (faster) or install all of the suggested dependencies at once (slower, will also give you a number of other packages you may or may not want):

## install sf only
install.packages("sf")

## install all suggested dependencies
install.packages("censusxy", dependencies = TRUE)

Usage

The censusxy package contains two data sets, stl_homicides (n = 1,812) and stl_homicides_small (n = 24), that can be used to demonstrate the functionality of the package. The stl_homicides_small data is included specifically for quick experimentation, as its small sample size ensures an expedient response from the API.

To test censusxy's functionality, load the package and either of the sample data sets:

library(censusxy)

data <- stl_homicides

There are two possible variable configurations (simple and full, specified using the output argument), and two possible output class types (dataframe and sf, specified using the class argument):

homicide_sf <- cxy_geocode(data, street = "street_address", city = "city", state = "state", 
    output = "simple", class = "sf")

If you request an sf object, you easily preview the results with the mapview package:

> mapview::mapview(homicide_sf)

knitr::include_graphics("man/figures/homicide_example.png")

Contributor Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

slu-openGIS/censusxy documentation built on Jan. 20, 2025, 11:29 p.m.