legiscanBill: LegiScan Archival Bill Data
In wbuchanan/legiscanR: R interface to the LegiScan API

Description Usage Arguments Value See Also Examples

Parses and arranges XML output from LegiScan master data downloads and stores the results in a list of data frames.

1	legiscanBill(rawBill, fullText = c("state_link", "url"))

`rawBill`	An XML file object from the bill subdirectory of the master download
`fullText`	A character vector identifying where to retrieve the full text of the bills (e.g., LegiScan site 'url' or official sites 'state_link')

Creates a list object containing a several data.frame objects. The objects include the bill's meta data, status, history, text, and vote histories.

Other Parsing and Cleaning LegiScan Data: billids; fileLists; fileStructure; getFullText; legiBillHist; legiBillJSON; legiBillMeta; legiBillProg; legiBillSpons; legiBillTxt; legiPersonJSON; legiVotesJSON; legiscanPerson; legiscanVotes; xjformat

# Build directory structure from master data downloads
directoryTree <- fileStructure("data/msHistorical/")

# Create object with all file references stored in it
files <- fileLists(directoryTree)

# Pass the function a bill object for processing
bills <- legiscanBill(files[["bills"]][[1]][[1]])

# When working with archive files, the process is fairly computationally intense due to
# the large volume of I/O operations.  However, this is a process that may only need to be
# run on an annual/semi-annual basis as a means of building data to load into a data warehouse.
# To parse the entire archive you can do:
library(doMC)
registerDoMC(cores = 8)
bills <- list()
for (i in names(files[["bills"]])) {
		# Builds a large list of data frame objects
		bills[[i]] <- plyr::llply(files[["bills"]][[i]], legiscanBill, .parallel = TRUE)
}