bulast - A simpler R package to access the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) API

This package provides access to the Bureau of Labor Statistics API in an (arguably) friendlier interface than the blsAPI package, by hiding the JSON code under the hood and being a little more opinionated. It might not suit your use case, in which case you should definitely check out blsAPI.

It relies on httr, and returns the results as a data.table with a date field set at the last day of the period. That would be December 31 for both December and annual data, so a periodType field is set to either "Monthly" or "Annual".

Not yet tested with quarterly or semiannual data, and it will likely choke on them.

Installation

For now, it has not been submitted to CRAN since it is likely to evolve. You will have to use the devtools package to install directly from Github:

devtools::install_github("fcocquemas/bulast")

Examples

A simple example with the V1 API:

library(bulast)
r <- bulast(c('LAUCN040010000000005', 'LAUCN040010000000006'), 
            startyear = 2010, endyear = 2012)
r

This returns:

$status
[1] "REQUEST_SUCCEEDED"

$responseTime
[1] 89

$message
list()

$Results
                seriesID       date value periodType footnotes
 1: LAUCN040010000000005 2010-01-31 19164    Monthly          
 2: LAUCN040010000000005 2010-02-28 18996    Monthly          
 3: LAUCN040010000000005 2010-03-31 19252    Monthly          
 4: LAUCN040010000000005 2010-04-30 19834    Monthly          

...

69: LAUCN040010000000006 2012-09-30 23249    Monthly          
70: LAUCN040010000000006 2012-10-31 22888    Monthly          
71: LAUCN040010000000006 2012-11-30 22258    Monthly          
72: LAUCN040010000000006 2012-12-31 22415    Monthly          
                seriesID       date value periodType footnotes

A more complex example with the V2 API (requires a valid registration key from the BLS):

r <- bulast(c('LAUCN040010000000005', 'LAUCN040010000000006'),
            startyear = 2010, endyear = 2012,
            registrationKey = "cfbcf439326c4a2faa70451d74013819", 
            calculations = TRUE, annualaverage = TRUE)
r$Results[periodType=="Annual"]

This returns:

               seriesID       date value periodType footnotes pct_ch_1 pct_ch_3 pct_ch_6 pct_ch_12
1: LAUCN040010000000005 2010-12-31 19589     Annual                2.2      0.7     -1.5       1.4
2: LAUCN040010000000005 2011-12-31 18794     Annual                0.4      0.3        0      -4.1
3: LAUCN040010000000005 2012-12-31 18499     Annual                1.2     -0.6     -2.1      -1.6
4: LAUCN040010000000006 2010-12-31 23438     Annual                3.3      1.8     -2.6       2.2
5: LAUCN040010000000006 2011-12-31 23065     Annual                0.3     -0.3     -2.6      -1.6
6: LAUCN040010000000006 2012-12-31 22878     Annual                2.1        0     -4.5      -0.8