readUShouse {Ecdat} | R Documentation |
Read the list of representatives in the United States House of Representatives.
readUShouse(url.="http://house.gov/representatives/", nonvoting=c('American Samoa', 'District of Columbia', 'Guam', 'Northern Mariana Islands', 'Puerto Rico', 'Virgin Islands'), fixNonStandard=subNonStandardNames, ...)
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 |
... |
optional arguments passed to |
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
.
readUShouse
returns a data.frame
with the following
columns:
State |
A factor identifying the state or territory the person represents |
state |
2-letter US Postal Service abbreviation for the state or territory |
district |
the character vector identifying the district each person represents. This is either an integer in character format or 0 for "At Large". |
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 |
character vector identifying the room number of the office |
Phone |
character vector giving the phone number |
Committees |
a character vector giving the committee assignments of each representative |
surname |
character vector giving the surname of each representative |
givenName |
given name of each representative (possibly with middle name or initial, a nickname, and a suffix like "Jr.") |
Spencer Graves
getURL
readHTMLTable
readUSsenate
UShouse.senate
parseName
readUSstateAbbreviations
subNonStandardNames
readCookPVI
UShouse <- readUShouse()