[acs-r] Getting all zipcodes in the continental US

[arilamstein@gmail.com]

Hi Ezra,

Thanks for your help.  It sounds like implementing this feature will be
hard if I reply on making a custom geo.  I'm going to try what you suggest
at the end - making the geo with the wildcard, and then removingwhat I
don't need before returning it to the client.

Ari


On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 12:47 PM, Ezra Haber Glenn <eglenn at mit.edu> wrote:

>
> Ari:
>
> Good question.  Here are some thoughts on how to approach it:
>
> Your idea of creating something with geo.make(zip.code= "*"), and then
> modifying, if a great idea, but unfortunately it won't work: the
> geo.set that you create with a wildcard is pretty dumb -- it just
> contain the wildcard, not all the geographies that it matches to.
>
> Nonetheless, it's a good start, and can be used to get those
> geographies through a simple acs.fetch.  Try this:
>
> > my.geos=geo.make(zip.code="*")
>
> # the actual table number doesn't really matter here
> > some.data=acs.fetch(geography=my.geos, table.number="B01003")
>
> Now we have an acs.object, called some.data, that *does* include all
> the geographic info we need.  We can view it with
>
> # careful -- the whole thing is really long;
> # let's just look at the first few rows
> > head(geography(some.data))
>          NAME zipcodetabulationarea
> 1 ZCTA5 01001                 01001
> 2 ZCTA5 01002                 01002
> 3 ZCTA5 01003                 01003
> 4 ZCTA5 01005                 01005
> 5 ZCTA5 01007                 01007
> 6 ZCTA5 01008                 01008
>
> We can capture the "zipcodetabulationarea" values and use some subset
> of them to make a new geo.make:
>
> >
> sample.zips=geo.make(zip.code=sample(geography(some.data)$zipcodetabulationarea,
> 100))
>
> Unfortunately, if you try to make a geo.set with *all* of them, you
> get that same error you encountered -- it has to do with the way the
> function uses nested recursive loops, which may be less-than-ideal in
> theory, but in practice is fine.  (I think the upper limit may be
> around 700 or 800 items.)  To get around this, you could create your
> geo.set in multiple pieces, and then combine them with "geo.set.a +
> geo.set.b" of something similar.
>
> But all that said, I'd warn you that the acs.fetch command is *very*
> slow with very large geo.sets -- each one needs to be individually
> fetched, and then the results assembled.  (This is one reason why the
> limit of geo.set size at creation is not really a big problem from my
> point of view.)  Far better is to just use the wildcard and then
> *remove* the rows that you don't want (i.e., select and remove the
> ones for Alaska and Hawaii, in this case).  Would that work?
>
> --Ezra
>
> At Sun, 13 Apr 2014 13:57:32 -0400, arilamstein wrote:
> >
> > I am trying to use geo.make to create a geography of all zip codes /
> > zctas in the continental US.  This is slightly challenging because the
> > documentation to geo.make says that if you specify the zip.code
> > parameter then no other geographies can be selected.
> >
> > My solution is to use the zipcode package to create a list of all
> > zipcodes in the continental us, and then pass that to geo.make.
> > However, this creates an error:
> >
> > library(maps) library(zipcode) data(zipcode)
> >
> > states_continental = setdiff(state.abb, c("AK", "HI"))
> > states_continental = c(states_continental, "DC") zips =
> > zipcode[zipcode$state %in% states_continental, "zip"]
> >
> > geo = geo.make(zip.code=zips) Error: evaluation nested too deeply:
> > infinite recursion / options(expressions=)?  Error during wrapup:
> > evaluation nested too deeply: infinite recursion /
> > options(expressions=)?
> >
> > I tried to step thru the geo.make code but was not sure how it worked.
> > I suspect the error is that the zipcode package includes valid zips
> > that are not zctas (e.g. zip codes that refer to post offices), and
> > that might cause a problem.  But I am wondering if there is a bug in
> > the acs code, or if there is a better way to get the result I am
> > looking for.
> >
> > As a workaround, is there an easy way to remove elements from the
> > result of geo.make(zip.code= "*")?  The resulting object is an S4
> > object, which I don't have experience with.  If the result were a
> > data.frame I could just use subsetting against the zips variable I
> > have above.  But I am not sure how to do the equivalent operation with
> > the resulting S4 object.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > Ari
> >
> >
>
> --
> Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP
> Department of Urban Studies and Planning
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology
> 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-337
> Cambridge, MA 02139
> eglenn at mit.edu
> http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn |
> http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/
> 617.253.2024 (w)
> 617.721.7131 (c)
>
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