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Import and format Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) TableBuilder files

Usage

read_table_builder(dataset, filetype = "csv", sheet = 1, removeTotal = TRUE)

Arguments

dataset

Either a dataframe containing the original data from TableBuilder or a character string containing the path of the unzipped TableBuilder file.

filetype

A character string containing the filetype. Valid values are 'csv', 'legacycsv' and 'xlsx' (default = 'csv'). Required even when dataset is a dataframe. Use 'legacycsv' for csv files derived from earlier versions of TableBuilder for which csv outputs were csv versions of the xlsx files. Current csv output from TableBuilder follow a more standard csv format.

sheet

An integer value containing the index of the sheet in the xlsx file (default = 1).

removeTotal

A boolean value. If TRUE removes the rows and columns with totals (default = TRUE).

Details

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) provides customised tables for census and other datasets in a format that is difficult to use in R because it contains rows with additional information. This function imports the original (unzipped) TableBuilder files in .csv or .xlsx format before creating an R dataframe with the data.

Note: we recommend using the readabs package for this purpose.