This package provides access to the
API for the United
States Federal Register. The API
provides access to all Federal Register contents since
1994, including
Executive Orders by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama and all “Public
Inspection”
Documents
made available prior to publication in the Register. The API returns
basic details about each entry in the Register and provides URLs for
HTML, PDF, and plain text versions of the contents thereof, and the data
are fully searchable. The federalregister package provides access to
all version 1 API endpoints.
The package can be installed from GitHub:
if (!library('devtools')) {
install.packages('devtools')
library('devtools')
}
install_github('rOpenGov/federalregister')
library('federalregister')
Below are some examples of possible uses of the package.
One cool feature of the Federal Register API is the ability to retrieve Executive Orders. Constructing the necessary API request, for example, to retrieve all Executive Orders for 2013 from President Obama is a bit complicated:
Doing it using federalregister is quite a bit easier:
library('federalregister')
clinton <- fr_search(presidential_document_type='executive_order',
president='william-j-clinton', per_page=1000)
bush <- fr_search(presidential_document_type='executive_order',
president='george-w-bush', per_page=1000)
obama <- fr_search(presidential_document_type='executive_order',
president='barack-obama', per_page=1000)
# number of Executive Orders
c(clint=clinton$count, bush=bush$count, obama=obama$count) clint bush obama
968143 968143 968143
Each Federal Registry entry includes data on agency mentions (i.e., what agencies the entry applies to). We can use this information to analyze which agencies are getting attention, even over time.
library('federalregister')
a <- c('barry-m-goldwater-scholarship-and-excellence-in-education-foundation',
'assassination-records-review-board',
'arctic-research-commission')
out <- lapply(a, function(x) fr_search(agencies=x, fields='', per_page=1000)$results)
setNames(sapply(out, length), a)barry-m-goldwater-scholarship-and-excellence-in-education-foundation
0
assassination-records-review-board
0
arctic-research-commission
0
The API returns metadata about entries in the Federal Register,
including links to HTML, PDF, and plain text versions of entries in the
Federal Register. Using federalregister to retrieve the plain text
URLs, it is then possible to reconstruct the contents of the Register
for use in, e.g., some kind of text mining analysis.
arecord <- fr_get('E9-1719')
full <- httr::content(httr::GET(arecord[[1]]$raw_text_url), "text", encoding = "UTF-8")
cat(substring(full, 1, 1000))<html>
<head>
<title>Federal Register, Volume 74 Issue 15 (Monday, January 26, 2009)</title>
</head>
<body><pre>
[Federal Register Volume 74, Number 15 (Monday, January 26, 2009)]
[Presidential Documents]
[Pages 4673-4678]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [<a href="http://www.gpo.gov">www.gpo.gov</a>]
[FR Doc No: E9-1719]
