Eurostat is the statistical office of the European Union and provides high quality statistics for Europe. Large set of the data is disseminated through the Eurostat database (< https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database>). The tools are using the REST API with the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX < https://sdmx.org>) Web Services (< https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/sdmx-web-services/about-this-service>) to search and download data from the Eurostat database using the SDMX standard.
An R package to search and retrieve data from Eurostat database using SDMX
Now 'restatapi' is on CRAN so it can be installed by
or use the development version from GitHub
> devtools::install_github("eurostat/restatapi")This package is similar to other packages like the eurostat, rdbnomics or TSsdmx which can be used to download data from Eurostat database. The difference is that restatapi is based on SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange) and XML to search and retrieve datasets and was developed with small number of dependencies on other packages. The restatapi package provides flexible filtering options, data caching, and uses the parallel and data.table package to handle large dataset in an efficient way.
The package contains 5 main functions and several other sub functions:
get_eurostat_toc function downloads the Table of Contents (TOC) of all Eurostat datasets,search_eurostat_toc function provides the facility to search for phrase/pattern in the TOC and returns the rows of the TOC where the phrase/pattern found.get_eurostat_dsd function returns the Data Structure Definition (DSD) of a given dataset containing the possible dimensions and values with their labels.search_eurostat_dsd function provides the facility to search for phrase/pattern in the DSD and returns the rows of the DSD where the phrase/pattern found.get_eurostat_data function retrieves a data table which can be labeled using the labels from the DSD. The table can contain the whole datasets or only part of it if filters are applied.Detailed documentation of the functions is in the package.
> options(restatapi_cores=3)> get_eurostat_toc()> get_get_eurostat_toc(mode="txt",verbose=TRUE)>> search_eurostat_toc("energie",lang="de",ignore.case=TRUE)> > dsd<-get_eurostat_dsd("ei_bsfs_q")> search_eurostat_dsd("EU",dsd)> > get_eurostat_data("NAMA_10_GDP")> get_eurostat_data("nama_10_gdp",update_cache=TRUE)> get_eurostat_data("nama_10_gdp",cache_dir="/tmp",stringAsFactors=FALSE)>> options(restatapi_update=TRUE)> options(restatapi_cache_dir=file.path(tempdir(),"restatapi"))>> dt<-get_eurostat_data("avia_par_me",select_freq="A",cache=FALSE)> dt<-get_eurostat_data("agr_r_milkpr",date_filter=2008,keep_flags=TRUE)> dt<-get_eurostat_data("avia_par_ee",> filters="BE$",> date_filter=c("2017-03",2016,"2017-07-01",2012:2014),> select_freq="Q",> label=TRUE,> verbose=TRUE)> options(restatapi_cache_dir=tempdir())> dt<-get_eurostat_data("agr_r_milkpr",> filters=c("BE$","Hungary"),> date_filter="2007-06<",> keep_flags=TRUE)> dt<-get_eurostat_data("agr_r_milkpr",> filters="BE",> date_filter="2006-02:2008-06-05",> ignore.case=TRUE,> keep_flags=TRUE,> stringsAsFactors=FALSE,> label=TRUE)> dt<-get_eurostat_data("nama_10_a10_e",> filters=c("Annual","EU28","Belgium","AT","Total","EMP_DC","person"),> date_filter=c("2008",2002,"2005-01",2013:2018))> dt<-get_eurostat_data("avia_par_me",> filters="Q...ME_LYPG_HU_LHBP+ME_LYTV_UA_UKKK",> date_filter=c("2016-08","2017-07-01"),> select_freq="M") > dt<-get_eurostat_data("avia_par_me",> filters=c("HU","Quarterly","Monthly"),> date_filter=c("2016-08","2014-03-01"),> label=TRUE)>> clean_restatapi_cache(tempdir(),verbose=TRUE)