Wrap the country name with quotes. Normally ACLED returns only 500 records per request. This function overides that constraint and returns all records matching your country and year parameters. This may occasionally exceed ACLED API memory limits and throw an error. If you specify a country and no year, you are requesting all records of that country. If you get an error, you have likely exceeded the memory limit.
Add a year to your request and see if you get data back.
If you do not specifiy either argument, this function returns the 10,000 most recent records from ACLED.
Required packages: jsonlite, data.table, lubridate, stringr
The function takes two arguments, country name and/or year.
getACLED <- function(country = NULL, year = NULL)# all Nigeria data
myNigeriaData <- getACLED("Nigeria")
# or just one year for Nigeria
my2016NigeriaData <- getACLED("Nigeria", 2016)
# or the latest 10,000 records in the ACLED database
latestAcled <- getACLED()source("acled_api_pull.R")
# make a list of countries you want data about
lcblist <- c("Nigeria", "Niger", "Cameroon", "Chad")
# use lapply to run the getACLED function for each country
lcb_data_list <- lapply(lcblist, getACLED)
# combine the results into a single data.table
lcb <- rbindlist(lcb_data_list)
# remove the big list
rm(lcb_data_list)This is a simple function that has no error handling. All errors I have received when using this function are result of exceeding ACLED's memory limits. In which case I just run it one country at time with a year specified.
If anyone is interested in adding error handling, I welcome it.