Reads and merges geo files that have been obtained from the US Census Bureau FTP site for American Community Survey (ACS) data. It uses read.fwf() at least for older years.
Usage
read.geo(
mystates,
folder = getwd(),
end.year = acsdefaultendyearhere_func(),
silent = FALSE
)Arguments
- mystates
Character vector of one or more states/DC/PR, as 2-character state abbreviations. Default is all states/DC/PR.
- folder
Optional path to where files are stored, defaults to getwd()
- end.year
End year of 5-year data, like "2018"
- silent
Default is FALSE. Whether to send progress info to standard output.
Value
Returns a large data.frame of selected geographic information on
all block groups and tracts in the specified states/DC/PR, with just these fields:
"STUSAB", "SUMLEVEL", "LOGRECNO", "STATE", "COUNTY", "TRACT", "BLKGRP", "GEOID"
Details
Note that if this finds the geographic file in folder already, it will not download it again even if that file was corrupt.
Extracts just block group (SUMLEVEL=150) and tract (SUMLEVEL=140) geo information (not county info., since data files used in this package lack county info.)
The NAME field works on pc but mac can hit an error if trying to read the NAME field. Due to encoding? specifying encoding didn't help.
(name is very long and not essential)
Error in substring(x, first, last) :
invalid multibyte string at '
Format of files is here: ftp://ftp.census.gov/acs2012_5yr/summaryfile/ACS_2008-2012_SF_Tech_Doc.pdf
Examples
if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
geo <- read.geo( c("dc", "de") )
} # }