eurostatr

The aim of this package is to simplify the process of getting data from Eurostat's online database (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/statistics/search_database). Datasets are available from Eurostat as tab-separated values file, but the format is awkward to work with: the data are typically in "wide" format (see http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf) and all but two of the variables are held in the first column as comma-separated values.

The functions in this package unpack Eurostat's format into a more usable R data frame.

Installation

## Install the devtools package
library(devtools)

install_github("triangle-man/eurostatr")

Downloading data from Eurostat

You will need to have downloaded the required dataset (as a .gz file) from Eurostat's "bulk download facility" (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/NavTree_prod/everybody/BulkDownloadListing) and gunzipped it. One way to do this is via curl. For example, to get the dataset nrg_100a:

curl 'http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/NavTree_prod/everybody/BulkDownloadListing?file=data/nrg_100a.tsv.gz' | gunzip > nrg_100a.tsv

Converting the downloaded data to R

Run read.eurostat() on the .tsv file resulting from gunzipping the downloaded file:

nrg <- read.eurostat("nrg_100a.tsv", value.name = "energy")

See also

The CRAN package "SmarterPoland" (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SmarterPoland/index.html) does the same thing (in fact, slightly more -- it also performs the download from Eurostat and will get the dictionary files as well).