Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: ''

First of all, I wanted to thank you for the package. Hugely helpful. However, there are occasional problems that may or may not be with the package and this is one of them.

I keep getting the same error message WRT all sorts of acs commands, with just one (recent) year: 2013.

For example, following commands:

acs.lookup(endyear=2013, span=5, keyword = "population", dataset="acs")

test <- acs.fetch(endyear=2013, span =5, table.number = "B01003", geography=A, dataset ="acs")

seem to consistently produce the following error Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: ''

I do strongly suspect that this is an issue with census API rather than the package since only one year seems to be affected by this. I was wondering what I should do even if that is the case. Some suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you!

Just checking -- are these problems continuing? Only 2013...?

Thanks!

On Thu, 27 Sep 2018 01:11:33 -0400, Andy Cochran wrote:

First of all, I wanted to thank you for the package. Hugely helpful. However, there are occasional problems that may or may not be with the package and this is one of them.

I keep getting the same error message WRT all sorts of acs commands, with just one (recent) year: 2013.

For example, to the following commands:

acs.lookup(endyear=2013, span=5, keyword = "population", dataset="acs")

or

test <- acs.fetch(endyear=2013, span =5, table.number = "B01003", geography=A, dataset = "acs")

seem to consistently produce the following error Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: ''

I do strongly suspect that this is an issue with census API rather than the package since only one year seems to be affected by this. I was wondering what I should do even if that is the case. Some suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you!

― You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.*

-- Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-346
Cambridge, MA 02139
eglenn@mit.edu
http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn
617.253.2024 (w)
617.721.7131 (c)

Hello,

Thank you for the message!

Apparently, it was a problem with the Census Bureau API itself. They have fixed it since then.

There is one other question that I have (although, this, again, may have more to do with the workings of census bureau API than with the acs package.) I realize that you are probably busy and would not be able to lend time for this, but I was wondering if you have a suggestion about how to deal with this if you don't mind and if it is at all possible.

I've been trying to access fairly large amounts of data via acs package: a set of tables for all census tracts in LA county for 2010-2016 period. (I was trying to obtain only a subset of the tracts in the earlier attempts and this is now entirely successful now that the problem with 2013 has been resolved). Since there are several thousand census tracts (over 2000) in LA county and acs.fetch does not seem to like overly large geographies, I had to break down the vector of tracts to 5 vectors and set up a set of fairly big loops interspersed with sys.sleep(10). The problem that I keep running into is that, after some time, the census API would refuse to transmit data, even though, at least in principle, all the sys.sleep(10) commands should insert breaks between the data requests. Is there a good way to work around this? I c&p'ed a piece of the code below that I'd been using unsuccessfully for this purpose (there are, admittedly, far more tables than shown here, and the code in turn is nested in another loop since I split up the geography into 5 pieces.) I do wonder if the root of the problem is that I am simply being too greedy with the data...

for( i in 10:16) { nam<-paste ("pop",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B01003", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste("race",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B02001", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste ("med_age",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B01002", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste ("citizenship",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B05001", dataset="acs", ))) }

Thank you so much!

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 12:00 PM Ezra Glenn notifications@github.com wrote:

Just checking -- are these problems continuing? Only 2013...?

Thanks!

On Thu, 27 Sep 2018 01:11:33 -0400, Andy Cochran wrote:

First of all, I wanted to thank you for the package. Hugely helpful. However, there are occasional problems that may or may not be with the package and this is one of them.

I keep getting the same error message WRT all sorts of acs commands, with just one (recent) year: 2013.

For example, to the following commands:

acs.lookup(endyear=2013, span=5, keyword = "population", dataset="acs")

or

test <- acs.fetch(endyear=2013, span =5, table.number = "B01003", geography=A, dataset = "acs")

seem to consistently produce the following error Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: ''

I do strongly suspect that this is an issue with census API rather than the package since only one year seems to be affected by this. I was wondering what I should do even if that is the case. Some suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you!

― You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.*

-- Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP Department of Urban Studies and Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-346 Cambridge, MA 02139 eglenn@mit.edu http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn 617.253.2024 (w) 617.721.7131 (c)

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/eglenn/acs/issues/3#issuecomment-433167809, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/Amhh3cFzKWSDGnQaJL-3BrtDHo2IiJrqks5uogpKgaJpZM4W762p .

Probably just too greedy, but just to check on obvious thing: are you using the tract="*" wildcard to get all the tracts? The API seems to be happier giving lots of tracts when you do that, as opposed to giving it a long list of them.

--Ezra

On Thu, 25 Oct 2018 15:46:00 -0400, Andy Cochran wrote:

Hello,

Thank you for the message!

Apparently, it was a problem with the Census Bureau API itself. They have fixed it since then.

There is one other question that I have (although, this, again, may have more to do with the workings of census bureau API than with the acs package.) I realize that you are probably busy and would not be able to lend time for this, but I was wondering if you have a suggestion about how to deal with this if you don't mind and if it is at all possible.

I've been trying to access fairly large amounts of data via acs package: a set of tables for all census tracts in LA county for 2010-2016 period. (I was trying to obtain only a subset of the tracts in the earlier attempts and this is now entirely successful now that the problem with 2013 has been resolved). Since there are several thousand census tracts (over 2000) in LA county and acs.fetch does not seem to like overly large geographies, I had to break down the vector of tracts to 5 vectors and set up a set of fairly big loops interspersed with sys.sleep(10). The problem that I keep running into is that, after some time, the census API would refuse to transmit data, even though, at least in principle, all the sys.sleep(10) commands should insert breaks between the data requests. Is there a good way to work around this? I c&p'ed a piece of the code below that I'd been using unsuccessfully for this purpose (there are, admittedly, far more tables than shown here, and the code in turn is nested in another loop since I split up the geography into 5 pieces.) I do wonder if the root of the problem is that I am simply being too greedy with the data...

for( i in 10:16) { nam<-paste ("pop",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B01003", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste("race",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B02001", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste ("med_age",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B01002", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste ("citizenship",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B05001", dataset="acs", ))) }

Thank you so much!

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 12:00 PM Ezra Glenn notifications@github.com wrote:

Just checking -- are these problems continuing? Only 2013...?

Thanks!

On Thu, 27 Sep 2018 01:11:33 -0400, Andy Cochran wrote:

First of all, I wanted to thank you for the package. Hugely helpful. However, there are occasional problems that may or may not be with the package and this is one of them.

I keep getting the same error message WRT all sorts of acs commands, with just one (recent) year: 2013.

For example, to the following commands:

acs.lookup(endyear=2013, span=5, keyword = "population", dataset="acs")

or

test <- acs.fetch(endyear=2013, span =5, table.number = "B01003", geography=A, dataset = "acs")

seem to consistently produce the following error Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: ''

I do strongly suspect that this is an issue with census API rather than the package since only one year seems to be affected by this. I was wondering what I should do even if that is the case. Some suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you!

― You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.*

-- Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP Department of Urban Studies and Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-346 Cambridge, MA 02139 eglenn@mit.edu http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn 617.253.2024 (w) 617.721.7131 (c)

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/eglenn/acs/issues/3#issuecomment-433167809, or mute the thread

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No, I have not tried that. Let me try and report back.

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 2:39 PM Ezra Glenn notifications@github.com wrote:

Probably just too greedy, but just to check on obvious thing: are you using the tract="*" wildcard to get all the tracts? The API seems to be happier giving lots of tracts when you do that, as opposed to giving it a long list of them.

--Ezra

On Thu, 25 Oct 2018 15:46:00 -0400, Andy Cochran wrote:

Hello,

Thank you for the message!

Apparently, it was a problem with the Census Bureau API itself. They have fixed it since then.

There is one other question that I have (although, this, again, may have more to do with the workings of census bureau API than with the acs package.) I realize that you are probably busy and would not be able to lend time for this, but I was wondering if you have a suggestion about how to deal with this if you don't mind and if it is at all possible.

I've been trying to access fairly large amounts of data via acs package: a set of tables for all census tracts in LA county for 2010-2016 period. (I was trying to obtain only a subset of the tracts in the earlier attempts and this is now entirely successful now that the problem with 2013 has been resolved). Since there are several thousand census tracts (over 2000) in LA county and acs.fetch does not seem to like overly large geographies, I had to break down the vector of tracts to 5 vectors and set up a set of fairly big loops interspersed with sys.sleep(10). The problem that I keep running into is that, after some time, the census API would refuse to transmit data, even though, at least in principle, all the sys.sleep(10) commands should insert breaks between the data requests. Is there a good way to work around this? I c&p'ed a piece of the code below that I'd been using unsuccessfully for this purpose (there are, admittedly, far more tables than shown here, and the code in turn is nested in another loop since I split up the geography into 5 pieces.) I do wonder if the root of the problem is that I am simply being too greedy with the data...

for( i in 10:16) { nam<-paste ("pop",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B01003", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste("race",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B02001", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste ("med_age",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B01002", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste ("citizenship",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B05001", dataset="acs", ))) }

Thank you so much!

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 12:00 PM Ezra Glenn notifications@github.com wrote:

Just checking -- are these problems continuing? Only 2013...?

Thanks!

On Thu, 27 Sep 2018 01:11:33 -0400, Andy Cochran wrote:

First of all, I wanted to thank you for the package. Hugely helpful. However, there are occasional problems that may or may not be with the package and this is one of them.

I keep getting the same error message WRT all sorts of acs commands, with just one (recent) year: 2013.

For example, to the following commands:

acs.lookup(endyear=2013, span=5, keyword = "population", dataset="acs")

or

test <- acs.fetch(endyear=2013, span =5, table.number = "B01003", geography=A, dataset = "acs")

seem to consistently produce the following error Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: ''

I do strongly suspect that this is an issue with census API rather than the package since only one year seems to be affected by this. I was wondering what I should do even if that is the case. Some suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you!

― You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.*

-- Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP Department of Urban Studies and Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-346 Cambridge, MA 02139 eglenn@mit.edu http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn 617.253.2024 (w) 617.721.7131 (c)

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/eglenn/acs/issues/3#issuecomment-433167809, or mute the thread

< https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/Amhh3cFzKWSDGnQaJL-3BrtDHo2IiJrqks5uogpKgaJpZM4W762p

;

.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.*

-- Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP Department of Urban Studies and Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-346 Cambridge, MA 02139 eglenn@mit.edu http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn 617.253.2024 (w) 617.721.7131 (c)

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Wow, that really does make things go far more smoothly! Thank you!

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 2:39 PM Ezra Glenn notifications@github.com wrote:

Probably just too greedy, but just to check on obvious thing: are you using the tract="*" wildcard to get all the tracts? The API seems to be happier giving lots of tracts when you do that, as opposed to giving it a long list of them.

--Ezra

On Thu, 25 Oct 2018 15:46:00 -0400, Andy Cochran wrote:

Hello,

Thank you for the message!

Apparently, it was a problem with the Census Bureau API itself. They have fixed it since then.

There is one other question that I have (although, this, again, may have more to do with the workings of census bureau API than with the acs package.) I realize that you are probably busy and would not be able to lend time for this, but I was wondering if you have a suggestion about how to deal with this if you don't mind and if it is at all possible.

I've been trying to access fairly large amounts of data via acs package: a set of tables for all census tracts in LA county for 2010-2016 period. (I was trying to obtain only a subset of the tracts in the earlier attempts and this is now entirely successful now that the problem with 2013 has been resolved). Since there are several thousand census tracts (over 2000) in LA county and acs.fetch does not seem to like overly large geographies, I had to break down the vector of tracts to 5 vectors and set up a set of fairly big loops interspersed with sys.sleep(10). The problem that I keep running into is that, after some time, the census API would refuse to transmit data, even though, at least in principle, all the sys.sleep(10) commands should insert breaks between the data requests. Is there a good way to work around this? I c&p'ed a piece of the code below that I'd been using unsuccessfully for this purpose (there are, admittedly, far more tables than shown here, and the code in turn is nested in another loop since I split up the geography into 5 pieces.) I do wonder if the root of the problem is that I am simply being too greedy with the data...

for( i in 10:16) { nam<-paste ("pop",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B01003", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste("race",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B02001", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste ("med_age",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B01002", dataset="acs" ))) nam<-paste ("citizenship",i,sep="") assign (nam, (acs.fetch(endyear=2000+i, span=5, geography = LAC, table.number="B05001", dataset="acs", ))) }

Thank you so much!

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 12:00 PM Ezra Glenn notifications@github.com wrote:

Just checking -- are these problems continuing? Only 2013...?

Thanks!

On Thu, 27 Sep 2018 01:11:33 -0400, Andy Cochran wrote:

First of all, I wanted to thank you for the package. Hugely helpful. However, there are occasional problems that may or may not be with the package and this is one of them.

I keep getting the same error message WRT all sorts of acs commands, with just one (recent) year: 2013.

For example, to the following commands:

acs.lookup(endyear=2013, span=5, keyword = "population", dataset="acs")

or

test <- acs.fetch(endyear=2013, span =5, table.number = "B01003", geography=A, dataset = "acs")

seem to consistently produce the following error Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: ''

I do strongly suspect that this is an issue with census API rather than the package since only one year seems to be affected by this. I was wondering what I should do even if that is the case. Some suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you!

― You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.*

-- Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP Department of Urban Studies and Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-346 Cambridge, MA 02139 eglenn@mit.edu http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn 617.253.2024 (w) 617.721.7131 (c)

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/eglenn/acs/issues/3#issuecomment-433167809, or mute the thread

< https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/Amhh3cFzKWSDGnQaJL-3BrtDHo2IiJrqks5uogpKgaJpZM4W762p

;

.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.*

-- Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP Department of Urban Studies and Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-346 Cambridge, MA 02139 eglenn@mit.edu http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn 617.253.2024 (w) 617.721.7131 (c)

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eglenn / acs

Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: '' #3