pxRRead

About

The px file format is a format for offering statistical tables in an interactive way. It was introduced by the Statistics office of Sweden and is also used by statistical offices in other countries.

See here for a specification of this format: px file format specification

The goal of pxRRead is parse px cube files:

• from a download url for a px cube file
• from a px cube file that has been downloaded previously

Installation

You can install the development version of pxRRead with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("SDSC-ORD/pxRRead")

Usage

library(pxRRead)
scan_px_file('px-x-0102020203_110.px')
scan_px_file('https://www.pxweb.bfs.admin.ch/DownloadFile.aspx?file=px-x-0602000000_107')

Output

The goal of this package is to prepare the data and metadata for data science applications. This package is especially meant to also support large multilingual px files and allow to localize them to a supported language.

The output consist of a list of data and metadata:

• output$metadata includes all metadata in the default language
• output$dataframe is a tibble with the length of the DATA of the px cube
• The dimensions in "STUB" and "HEADING" of the px cube are all turned into columns of the tibble

output <- scan_px_file('https://www.pxweb.bfs.admin.ch/DownloadFile.aspx?file=px-x-0602000000_107')
output$metadata
output$dataframe

Option to localize the output for multilingual px cubes

If the px cube is multilingual: a locale can be specified with locale=<language code> to localize the output: then the metadata and dataframe will use the translations for the given locale.

The language code must match the language code used in the px cube and specified with the LANGUAGES keyword.

output <- scan_px_file(
  'https://www.pxweb.bfs.admin.ch/DownloadFile.aspx?file=px-x-0602000000_107',
  locale="en"
)
output$metadata
output$dataframe

Examples

In scripts directory there are examples to run. Most example are from the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics: /scripts/bfs_px_files.R but there is also a script /scripts/other_px_files.R for other px files. These scripts include complete examples. They are meant for further exploration of the output of this package.

Warnings and Restrictions

Encoding

Even though there is a CODE_PAGE specified in the px file the specified encoding does not always work to parse the file correctly with scan and fileEncoding. Therefor the encoding has been added as a parameter: encoding. The default is latin1. So if the file encoding seems incorrect it can be changed to UTF-8:

output <- scan_px_file(
  'https://www.pxweb.bfs.admin.ch/DownloadFile.aspx?file=px-x-1002020000_101',
  locale = "de",
  encoding = "UTF-8")