getSeries {RBNZ}

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",
  destDir,
  quiet = TRUE
)

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.

destDir

File path to a directory in which to place the downloaded spreadsheets. If not specified they will be placed into tempdir() and deleted on exit.

quiet

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

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.

Author(s)

Jasper Watson

Examples

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

## Not run: 

## 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')


## End(Not run)