RBNZ (version 3.0.0)

getSeries: Retrieve Data From the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Website

Description

Retrieves data from https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/statistics for the series specified by the user. This involves downloading one or more spreadsheets and reading them into R.

Usage

getSeries(
  series,
  option = getDefaultOption(series),
  replaceColumnNames = TRUE,
  fieldForColumnNames = "Series",
  reloadOnlyLatest = TRUE,
  cacheOnly = FALSE,
  destDir = NULL,
  quiet = TRUE,
  wait = 60
)

Value

For most series a list containing the fields “meta” and “data” which are data frames containing the metadata and actual data, respectively. There are a few series that do not follow this format, and for these the spreadsheets are just downloaded and read into a list of data frames, one for each sheet, with no organising or cleaning.

Arguments

series

Character string giving the name of the data series to retrieve.

option

Character string specifying which format of the data series to retrieve, if necessary. For information on the available options see the help file for the particular series name (for example ?B1 will tell you that the B1 series can be downloaded either as daily or monthly data, with the former being the default). This argument is unnecessary for series that only have one data format.

replaceColumnNames

Logical indicating whether to change the column names of the output data from the Series ID's used in the source spreadsheets to more informative values based on the information in the metadata. Defaults to TRUE.

fieldForColumnNames

If replaceColumnNames is TRUE then this variable specifies which columns of the meta data file will be used to construct the column names. Defaults to “Series” but sometimes you may want to change it to “Group” or c(“Group”, “Series”). “SeriesID” is also allowed.

reloadOnlyLatest

Logical indicated whether to skip downloading files containing past data (with a defined endpoint) if they already exist. For example if a series has separate spreadsheets for start-to-2015 and 2015-onwards then we don't need to repeatedly download the former item; only the latter one will be updated.

cacheOnly

Logical indicating that the RBNZ website should not be read and the files only loaded from an existing cache on disk.

destDir

File path to a directory in which to place the downloaded spreadsheets. If not specified the value of getOption("RBNZ.destDir") will be checked. If that is NULL too then the files will be placed into tempdir() and deleted on exit.

quiet

Logical to be passed to utils::download.file.

wait

Numeric giving the number of seconds to wait between downloads. Defaults to 60. Note that this applies to reading the series page and to each individual spreadsheet download, so a series with one spreadsheet would have two downloads sixty seconds apart.

Author

Jasper Watson

Examples

## List the available data series.
print(allAvailableSeries())

if (FALSE) {

## Download exchange rate data and plot NZD vs sterling.
b1 <- getSeries('B1')
plot(b1$data$Date, b1$data$UK_pound_sterling, type = 'l')

## Now use monthly data (previous was daily).
b1_monthly <- getSeries('B1', 'monthly')
plot(b1_monthly$data$Date, b1_monthly$data$UK_pound_sterling,
type = 'l')

}