ACS Data Users Group

Hi,

I hope this is OK. I plan on posting when I find errors. Two county names are spelled differently on B1903. They are, Bayamón Municipio, Puerto Rico and Doña Ana County, New Mexico. The special characters are presented differently. I use names to match data sets and this is how I found out. In the other 30 tables all names matched exactly.

I'd strongly recommend you use the GEOID/FIPS codes rather than names, for precisely this reason. Some file formats don't do well with diacritical marks (you can see how they came out in your post). Often, even when they do appear to be formatted correctly, software still won't match them. That's why the GEOIDs exist, and are standard across all datasets you'll ever find at the county-equivalent level.

Thanks for all the feedback. When I download the files none of them have codes. I am not at the point of using an API or R etc. I just am downloading the data tables and trying to match them up. If you know of any way to add the codes to these downloads please let me know. Thanks!

I find it hard to believe that any data set downloaded from data.census.gov would not include geocodes.

I did have that happen once a couple months back. Not sure why. In any event, I didn't need to work with the data. There is definitely a case to be made about describing under what conditions something like downloading a file which lacks GeoIDs happens.

I think you would need to specifically request that codes be omitted from a CSV file or other data file for them not to appear.

I am using the excel button that saves it as an excel file. Not using API etc. I have to learn about the table and data first.

Hmm, I see what you mean. The Excel (.xlsx) and CSV buttons result in files without codes. Perhaps it's intended for a nontechnical audience.

Use this instead:

...or...

Maybe you could attach one of those files and a link where it was downloaded from. (I realize this is when pasting screenshots would be helpful, alas!)

If you read those in as UTF-8, the accented characters should appear correctly. It also occurs in New Mexico, Doña Ana county, as well as some places in Colorado and California.