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hrecht / censusapi

R package to retrieve U.S. Census data and metadata via API
https://www.hrecht.com/censusapi/
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Siscuss differences to acs package in docs #16

Closed RoyalTS closed 7 years ago

RoyalTS commented 7 years ago

Would be good for people to get an idea of what the advantages/disadvantages of using the two packages are.

hrecht commented 7 years ago

I'm not very familiar with the latest versions of acs, but the main difference is that acs allows retrieval of data from the American Community Survey and Decennial Census APIs. censusapi accesses those APIs as well as the other Census APIs.

Other differences include how the arguments are specified and how data is returned. Generally, this package uses the same parameter names as the Census APIs themselves and returns data frames.

I think advantage/disadvantage depends on the user's preferences and goals, and what datasets they want to use. For that reason, I don't plan to directly compare/contrast this package with other Census wrappers like acs or tidycensus in the documentation at this time. I'm not familiar enough with acs to answer specific syntax comparison questions, etc but if you have general questions about this package I can certainly answer those or expand in the documentation.