restatis is a wrapper around the RESTful APIs that provide access to the three main databases of German official statistics:
- The GENESIS database of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis).
- regionalstatistik.de which is the database of the German Länder (Regionaldatenbank).
- The database of the German 2022 Census (Zensus 2022).
Almost all functions work on either one of them, on all of them or just on a selection.
You can install the released version of {restatis}
from CRAN:
install.packages("restatis")
Or install the development version of {restatis}
from
GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("CorrelAid/restatis")
To access each one of the APIs, you need to have an account that you can
create on the homepage (see links to them above) and store your username
and password for use in R with restatis::gen_auth_save()
(see
?gen_auth_save
for more details). The Zensus 2022 database does
support authentication with an API token as well.
{restatis} provides functions (prefixed with gen_
) for finding,
exploring, and retrieving data from the three supported APIs. See the
“Basic restatis workflow”
vignette
for an overview of the main features of the package.
In short, there are functions divided in two main parts, searching for (meta)data and retrieving data:
- gen_catalogue(): Search the API’s catalogue of data
- gen_find(): Find objects related to a search term
- gen_metadata(): Find meta data to an objects
- gen_alternative_terms(): Find alternative terms to a search term
- gen_modified_data(): Find out when an object has last been modified
- gen_objects2stat(), gen_objects2var(), gen_var2stat(), gen_val2var(), gen_val2var2stat() and gen_search_vars(): Find objects, statistics, variables and values related to each other
- gen_cube(): Using this function, you can download ‘cube’ objects
- gen_table(): Using this function, you can download ‘table’ objects
- gen_list_jobs() and gen_download_job(): Using this function, you can find and download previously created jobs (large tables)
- gen_logincheck(): Perform a logincheck to test your credentials
- gen_signs(): Get a list of quality signs (special characters) found in the API’s tables
- gen_update_evas(): Manually scrape a newer version of the EVAS numbers (official statistic IDs)
{restatis}
uses memoisation to
cache query results. This means that if you call a function multiple
times with the same input, the values returned the first time are stored
and reused from the second time. Cached objects are stored in the memory
and do not persist across R sessions. With version 0.3.0, we have
enabled users to turn off caching, this is especially useful for working
with jobs (so that the list of jobs from gen_list_jobs()
won’t get
cached). The caching option is set to TRUE by default and can be changed
by setting options(restatis.use_cache = TRUE)
(or FALSE
,
respectively). You can get the current state of the option by using
getOption("restatis.use_cache")
.
This package is in no way affiliated with the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) or the ‘Verbund Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder’. It is a simple wrapper providing R functions to access Destatis’ API. The package authors are in no way responsible for the data that can be retrieved using its functions and do not provide support for any problems arising from the APIs’ functionality itself. Conversely, support for problems related to this package is only provided by the package authors. The license of this package solely applies to its source code.