I'm trying to write a for loop that will take zip codes, make an API call to a database of Congressional information and then parse out only the parties of congressmen representing at zip code.
The issue is that some of the zip codes have more than one congressman and others have none at all, (an error on the part of the database, I think). That means I need to loop through the count returned by the original pull until there are no more representatives.
The issue is that the number of congressmen representing each zip code is different. Thus, I'd like to be able to write new variable names into my dataframe for each new congressman. That is, if there are 2 congressmen, I'd like to write new columns named "party.1" and "party.2", etc.
I have this code so far and I feel that I'm close, but I'm really stuck on what to do next. Thank you all for your help!
EDIT: I found this way to be easier, but I'm still not getting the results I'm looking for
library(rjson)
library(RCurl)
zips <- (c("10001","92037","90801", "94011")
test <- matrix(nrow=4,ncol=7)
temp <- NULL
tst <- NULL
for (i in 1:length(zips)) {
for (n in length(temp$count)) {
temp <- (fromJSON(getURL(paste('https://congress.api.sunlightfoundation.com/legislators/locate?zip=',
zips[i],'&apikey= 'INSERT YOUR API KEY', sep=""), .opts = list(ssl.verifypeer = FALSE))))
tst <- try(temp$results[[n]]$party, silent=T)
if(is(tst,"try-error"))
test[i,n] <- NA
else
test[i,n] <- (temp$results[[n]]$party)
}
}
install.packages("rsunlight")
library("rsunlight")
zips <- c("10001","92037","90801", "94011")
out <- lapply(zips, function(z) cg_legislators(zip = z))
# results for some only
sapply(out, "[[", "count")
# peek at results for one zip code
head(out[[1]]$results[,1:4])
bioguide_id birthday chamber contact_form
1 S000148 1950-11-23 senate http://www.schumer.senate.gov/Contact/contact_chuck.cfm
2 N000002 1947-06-13 house https://jerroldnadler.house.gov/forms/writeyourrep/default.aspx
3 M000087 1946-02-19 house https://maloney.house.gov/contact-me/email-me
4 G000555 1966-12-09 senate http://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/contact/
You can change as needed within a lapply or for loop to add columns, etc.
To pull out party could be as simple as lapply(zips, function(z) cg_legislators(zip = z)$results$party).