How to get U.S. Census data as CSV — censusapi2csv

This post is part of our data science series.

The U.S. Census and American Community Survey (ACS) are the crown jewels of open data (bother your Representative today to make sure they stay that way), but working with data from the Census API isn't always intuitive. Here's an example response to an API call for ACS per capita income data:

[["B19301_001E","state","county","tract","block group"],
["25611","50","007","000100","1"],
["36965","50","007","000100","2"],
["29063","50","007","000200","1"],
. . .

It's not a CSV, it's not exactly JSON, it's just . . . data. We tend to use CSVs as our basic building blocks, so we built a tool to nudge this response into a pure format. Here's how to use it:

Install

npm install censusapi2csv -g

Usage

Let's grab a few things from the ACS API: total population (B01001) and per capita income (B19301), for every block group in Chittenden County, Vermont:

censusapi2csv -l 'block group' -f B01001,B19301 -s 50 -c 007

. . . we can even pipe this into our favorite CSV-parsing tool, xsv:

censusapi2csv -l 'block group' -f B01001,B19301 -s 50 -c 007 | xsv table

. . . and we get a formatted look at the data:

B01001_001E  B19301_001E  state  county  tract   block group
3057         25611        50     007     000100  1
1200         36965        50     007     000100  2
1641         29063        50     007     000200  1
1882         28104        50     007     000200  2
699          61054        50     007     000200  3
. . .

This is just a tiny step in the process of working with census data - and there are many alternative approaches - but we thought it was worth sharing.