abs

The goal of abs is to provide a function to read csv tables downloaded from ABS TableBuilder without having to ‘tidy’ them first. Thus, this helps ti retain the meta information of the tables.

Table Builder

Currently, The package only works with Table Builder files downloaded as “CSV String Value (.csv)”, as shown in the image below.

Installation

You can install the development version of abs from GitHub with:

remotes::install_github("asiripanich/abs")

Example

The main function is abs_read_tb() which let you read in a TableBuilder file downloaded as “CSV String Value (.csv)” into a tidy data by ignoring all its metadata.

library(abs)
data_dir <- system.file("extdata", package = "abs")
test_csv <- file.path(data_dir, "tb1.csv")
mytable <- abs_read_tb(test_csv, .names = "simplify", exclude_total = TRUE)
#> Warning in fread(x, skip = which(has_count), header = FALSE): Stopped early on
#> line 20. Expected 3 fields but found 0. Consider fill=TRUE and comment.char=.
#> First discarded non-empty line: <<"Data Source: Census of Population and
#> Housing, 2011, TableBuilder">>
mytable
#>                              counting                           cacf      count
#> 1: Families, Place of Usual Residence            One child in family 16.0922299
#> 2: Families, Place of Usual Residence         Two children in family 15.1560423
#> 3: Families, Place of Usual Residence       Three children in family  5.8328819
#> 4: Families, Place of Usual Residence        Four children in family  1.5950983
#> 5: Families, Place of Usual Residence        Five children in family  0.3659169
#> 6: Families, Place of Usual Residence Six or more children in family  0.1763784
#> 7: Families, Place of Usual Residence                 Not applicable 60.7814864

Note that abs_read_tb returns a data.table object. To convert it back to data.frame simply use as.data.frame().

Related packages

• readabs: for reading time series data from ABS.
• stplanr: has a utility function, stplanr::read_table_builder(), for reading Table Builder files.