Read Poll Data — popRead • pollofpolls

Downloads a single Poll of Polls data set from POLITICO, or reads one saved by popDownload().

Usage

popRead(
  code,
  load = c("polls", "elections", "trends", "events"),
  metadata = TRUE,
  dir = NULL,
  firms = getOption("pollofpolls.firms")
)

Arguments

code

Code of the poll data, e.g. "DE-parliament". See popGetInfo() for the available codes.

load

Which parts to load: any of "polls", "elections", "trends" (the trends already published by POLITICO) and "events".

metadata

Whether party colours and the descriptive name should be looked up on the website.

dir

Directory with the files written by popDownload(). If given, the data is read from <dir>/<code>.json instead of being downloaded.

firms

Named character vector of firms to rename, see popRenameFirms().

Firm names that only differ in case, accents, punctuation and white space are merged under their most frequent spelling.

Value

A popPolls object. $polls holds one row per poll with the columns date, dateFrom, firm, firmRaw (the firm as published), n (sample size) and one column per party, $elections the same for election results, $parties the party codes, names and colours, $trends the published trends in long format and $events the events POLITICO marks in its charts.

Details

Party colours and the descriptive name are not part of the data endpoint and are looked up on the corresponding website. That lookup needs one additional request, is cached (see popCacheClear()) and can be switched off with metadata = FALSE.

Downloaded data is not cached unless options(pollofpolls.dataMaxAge) is set to the number of seconds a download may be reused.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
de = popRead('DE-parliament')
plot(de)

# read data saved by popDownload()
popDownload('polls', codes = 'AT-parliament')
at = popRead('AT-parliament', dir = 'polls', metadata = FALSE)
} # }