Ecfun: readUShouse – R documentation

Pricing

Become an expert in R — Interactive courses, Cheat Sheets, certificates and more!

Get Started for Free

Documentation

Ecfun

readUShouse

Read the list of representatives in the United States House of Representatives

Description

Read the list of representatives in the United States House of Representatives.

Usage

readUShouse(url.="https://www.house.gov/representatives/",
   nonvoting=c('American Samoa', 
    'District of Columbia', 'Guam', 
    'Northern Mariana Islands', 'Puerto Rico',
    'Virgin Islands'),
   fixNonStandard=subNonStandardNames, ...)

Arguments

`url.`	Universal resource locator to be read and processed to obtain the desired list
`nonvoting`	Character vector of the names of US territories that send a nonvoting delegate to the US House.
`fixNonStandard`	function to look for and repair nonstandard names such as names containing characters with accent marks that are sometimes mangled by different software. Use `identity` if this is not desired.
`...`	optional arguments passed to `fixNonStandard`

Details

1. House.gov <- readHTMLTable(url). As of April 2013, this is a list of 80 tables. The first 56 are for the 50 states and 6 territories. The remaining 24 are for the first letter of the last name of the representatives.

2. Use rbind to collapse these into 2 tables. The first has the district as a number without identifying the state (because that was with the names of the first 56 tables in House.gov). The second has the state names but with the district numbers in a form not easily parsed.

3. Obtain the state names from the second table to match the names of the representatives in the first.

4. Add a nonvoting column for those "States" in nonvoting.

5. Look for and fix surname and givenName with nonstandard characters using fixNonStandard.

Value

readUShouse returns a data.frame with row names = District (State + district, like "New York 3rd") and the following columns:

`State`	A `factor` identifying the state or territory the person represents
`state`	A `factor` giving the 2-letter US Postal Service abbreviation for the state or non-state governmental entity.
`district`	An `integer` identifying the district each person represents, with 0 for entities with only one representative, designated "At Large" for states, "Resident Commissioner" for Puerto Rico, and "Delegate" for the territories.
`Name`	A `character` vector giving the name of each representative (in "surname, given name" format)
`party`	a `factor` identifying the party affiliation of each representative ("D" or "R").
`Room`	a `character` vector identifying the room number of the office
`Phone`	a `character` vector giving the phone number
`Committees`	a `character` vector giving the committee assignments of each representative
`surname`	a `character` vector giving the surname of each representative
`givenName`	a `character` vector with the given name of each representative (possibly with middle name or initial, a nickname, and a suffix like "Jr.")

Author(s)

Spencer Graves

Examples

if(!fda::CRAN()){
UShouse <- readUShouse()
}

Ecfun

Functions for 'Ecdat'

v0.2-4

GPL (>= 2)

Authors

Spencer Graves <spencer.graves@effectivedefense.org>

Initial release

2020-10-26

readUShouse

Description

Usage

Arguments

Details

Value

Author(s)

See Also

Examples

Ecfun

We don't support your browser anymore