ACS Data Users Group

 View Only

  • 1.  Direct download of table from "Using the Census Data API With the American Community Survey: What Data Users Need to Know"

    Posted 09-20-2023 07:33 PM

    In the user forum there is a link to this;

    https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/acs/acs_api_handbook_2020_ch01.pdf

    In which there is a link to 2016 data at (on page 3);

    https://api.census.gov/data/2016/acs/acs5/variables.html

    This takes forever in a browser and can even crash Chrome. Where can I download the most recent set (2021), no web page just download?

    Any help is appreciated.

    Tom



  • 2.  RE: Direct download of table from "Using the Census Data API With the American Community Survey: What Data Users Need to Know"

    Posted 09-21-2023 02:36 PM

    Dear Tom

    I think that the url is the metadata for the 5 year 2016 Detail tables. I usually download the data using the API via the R package "censusapi" function listCensusMetadata, which by default downloads the variable metadata. You need the "dataset" name. For those use listCensusApis().

    censusapi is a great package and pretty easy to use.

    https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/censusapi/index.html

    https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/censusapi/censusapi.pdf

    Best,

    Dave

    I had no difficulty accessing the link in your post using firefox.



  • 3.  RE: Direct download of table from "Using the Census Data API With the American Community Survey: What Data Users Need to Know"

    Posted 09-21-2023 06:08 PM

    Thanks, R does not seem too hard, but it's just 1 more thing. Also, if it's soo easy (which I believe), why doesn't some census person spend 10 minutes and just post it for the 999,999 people who could really use it? So maybe this weekend I'll give it a try.