The censusxy package is designed to provide easy access to the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoding Tools in R. censusxy has also been developed specifically with large data sets in mind - only unique addresses are passed to the API for geocoding. If a data set exceeds 1,000 unique addresses, it will be automatically subset into appropriately sized API calls, geocoded, and then put back together so that a single object is returned. There is also support for parallel processing of requests, which can significantly shorten the time it takes to batch geocode large numbers of addresses.
censusxy is described in a 2021 paper in Transactions in GIS by Chris and Branson - please cite the paper if you use censusxy in your work!
Installation
Installing censusxy
The easiest way to get censusxy is to install it from CRAN:
install.packages("censusxy")Alternatively, the development version of censusxy can be accessed from GitHub with remotes:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("chris-prener/censusxy")Installing Suggested Dependencies
Since the package does not need sf for its basic functionality, it is a suggested dependency rather than a required one. However, many users will want to map these data as sf objects, and we therefore recommend users install sf. Windows and macOS users should be able to install sf without significant issues unless they are building from source. Linux users will need to install several open source spatial libraries to get sf itself up and running.
If you want to use these sf, you can either install it individually (faster) or install all of the suggested dependencies at once (slower, will also give you a number of other packages you may or may not want):
## install sf only
install.packages("sf")
## install all suggested dependencies
install.packages("censusxy", dependencies = TRUE)Resources
The main Get started article has:
- some tips on using
censusxyin different workflows - an overview of the package’s functionality,
- and considerations for handling computer timeout.
Contributor Code of Conduct
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.