Separate labels given to ACS data

This is a quick wrapper around tidyr::separate written to match the standard formatting used for ACS variable labels. These generally take the form e.g. "Total!!Male!!5 to 9 years". This function will separate values by "!!" and optionally drop the resulting "Total" column, which is generally constant for the entire data frame.

separate_acs(
  data,
  col = label,
  into = NULL,
  sep = "!!",
  drop_total = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

data

A data frame such as returned by cwi::multi_geo_acs or tidycensus::get_acs.

col

Bare column name where ACS labels are. Default: label

into

Character vector of names of new variables. If NULL (the default), names will be assigned as "x1", "x2," etc. If you don't want to include the Total column, this character vector only needs to include the groups other than Total (see examples).

sep

Character: separator between columns. Default: '!!'

drop_total

Logical, whether to include the "Total" column that comes from separating ACS data. Default: FALSE

...

Any additional arguments to be passed on to tidyr::separate.

Value

A data frame

See also

tidyr::separate

Examples

if (FALSE) {
if(interactive()){
   age <- label_acs(multi_geo_acs("B01001"))

   # Default: allow automatic labeling, in this case x1, x2, x3
   separate_acs(age)

   # Drop Total column, use automatic labeling (x1 & x2)
   separate_acs(age, drop_total = TRUE)

   # Keep Total column; assign names total, sex, age
   separate_acs(age, into = c("total", "sex", "age"))

   # Drop Total column; only need to name sex & age
   separate_acs(age, into = c("sex", "age"), drop_total = TRUE)

   # Carried over from tidyr::separate, using NA in place of the Total column
   # will also drop that column and yield the same as the previous example
   separate_acs(age, into = c(NA, "sex", "age"))
 }
}