Download BLS Time Series Data — fread

This function downloads a tab-delimited BLS flat file, incorporating diagnostic information about the file and returning an object with the bls_data class that can be used in the BLSloadR package.

Usage

fread_bls(
  url,
  verbose = FALSE,
  cache = check_bls_cache_env(),
  use_fallback = TRUE
)

Arguments

url: Character string. URL to the BLS flat file
verbose: Logical. If TRUE, prints additional messages during file read and processing. If FALSE (default), suppresses these messages.
cache: Logical. If TRUE, uses local persistent caching.
use_fallback: Logical. If TRUE and httr download fails, fallback to download.file(). Default TRUE.

Value

A named list with two elements:

data: A data.table with the results of passing the url contents to 'data.table::fread()' as a tab-delimited text file.
diagnostics: A named list of diagnostics run when reading the file including column names, empty columns, cleaning applied to the file, the url, the column names and original and final dimensions of the data.

Examples

# \donttest{
data <- fread_bls("https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/ec/ec.series")
# }