cancensus

Integrated, convenient, and uniform access to Canadian Census data and geography retrieved using the 'CensusMapper' API. This package produces analysis-ready tidy data frames and spatial data in multiple formats, as well as convenience functions for working with Census variables, variable hierarchies, and region selection. API keys are freely available with free registration at <https://censusmapper.ca/api>. Census data and boundary geometries are reproduced and distributed on an "as is" basis with the permission of Statistics Canada (Statistics Canada 1996; 2001; 2006; 2011; 2016; 2021).

Releases

28

Needs compilation

No

Needs R

>= 4.1

Config/roxygen2/version

8.0.0

LazyData

yes

• Official Statistics & Survey Statistics

Earlier: Analysis of Spatial Data (until 23 Oct 2021).

• Web APIs and services

Since March 2026

• digest
• dplyr
• geojsonsf
• httr
• jsonlite
• readr
• rlang
• sf

Installing it adds

48 packages, 29.3 MB of source

Of those, need compilation

33

• ggplot2
• knitr
• leaflet
• lwgeom
• mapdeck
• microbenchmark
• rmarkdown
• scales
• sp
• testthat
• tidyr
• xml2

Lines by kind (5,615)

Lines by language

Languages are counted from file extensions.

Files

99

R functions

63

Deprecated functions

1

Median

4

Mean

5.75

Highest

53

Median lines per function

24

R functions

63

Calls

77

Unconnected

12

Groups

2

Lines counted

1,255

Lines the tests ran

93

Tests passed

Yes

Measured with

covr 3.6.5 on R 4.6.1

Has tests

Yes

Test frameworks

testthat

Test cases

14

Lines of tests

423

Test lines per line of code

0.14

• cancensus
• Additional datasets: Annual T1FF taxfiler data
• Additional datasets: Structural type of dwelling by document type
• Data discovery
• Finding intersecting geometries from custom data
• Making maps with cancensus
• StatCan attribute files
• StatCan WDS

README

Yes, 1,320 words

Release notes file

Yes

Help pages

38

Lines of documentation

1,276

Commits

633

Open pull requests

0

Tagged releases

16

Latest tagged release

v0.6.1, 16 Jul 2026

Issues closed in

38 days (median)

Pull requests closed in

1 day (median)

Pull requests merged

89%

Created

28 Jul 2017

Licence file reads as

–

Method, repository practices

Across mountainMath

Bug fixes

• set_cancensus_api_key() and set_cancensus_cache_path() with overwrite = TRUE, install = TRUE no longer truncate the user's .Renviron when it does not already contain the corresponding key
• get_statcan_wds_data() no longer caches error response bodies as data, and refresh = TRUE now bypasses the data cache as documented
• remove_recalled_cached_data() no longer over-matches recalled vector IDs (e.g. a recall of v_CA21_1 no longer also flags cached data for v_CA21_10)
• get_census() now warns about recalled data when reading tabular data from the local cache, matching the geometry path
• parent_census_vectors() and child_census_vectors() now stop with "Unable to determine dataset" for mixed-dataset input instead of silently dropping vectors
• find_census_vectors() exact search now matches queries containing regex metacharacters (e.g. "income ($)") literally instead of erroring or silently failing
• find_census_vectors() semantic search now considers the best match for every query word (previously only the full phrase), and restores suffix n-grams dropped in 0.6.0
• find_census_vectors() keyword search no longer matches every vector when the query starts with a digit or punctuation
• visualize_vector_hierarchy() accepts multi-vector character input as documented, and no longer labels nodes truncated by max_depth as leaves (now marked with ...)
• add_unique_names_to_region_list() now correctly preserves grouping of grouped input
• list_census_datasets() and list_census_regions() staleness warnings now respect quiet = TRUE
• API retry logic now retries HTTP 429 (rate limit) and 408 (timeout) responses, honoring Retry-After headers
• The cache directory is now created recursively with a clear error on failure

Performance improvements

• New in-memory session cache for list_census_vectors() and list_census_regions(): repeated calls within a session no longer re-read and deserialize the cached file on every access (cache hits are ~1000x faster)
• parent_census_vectors() and child_census_vectors() use a hash-based BFS traversal, 4-8x faster on deep hierarchies on top of the 0.6.0 improvements, with identical output
• find_census_vectors() semantic search prunes fuzzy-match candidates by length bound before computing Levenshtein distances
• get_census() no longer scans the package library (installed.packages()) on spatial calls
• get_statcan_wds_metadata() parent ID extraction is vectorized (~5-10x faster metadata parsing for large levels such as DA)

Minor changes

• update links to refreshed CensusMapper