statcanR 0.3.0

Compatibility

• Existing calls to statcan_search(), statcan_data(), and statcan_download_data() remain supported.
• statcan_data() and statcan_download_data() now accept either a hyphenated table number such as "27-10-0014-01" or an eight-digit Product ID such as "27100014".
• statcan_download_data() gains an optional path argument. Its original two-argument form continues to save a CSV file in the working directory.

Data access

• Complete tables are now located through Statistics Canada’s official getFullTableDownloadCSV Web Data Service method.
• English and French downloads use one shared implementation and the same stable processing rules.
• Fixed statcan_download_data() returning before its CSV file was written.
• Fixed French downloads overwriting the first data column instead of naming it REF_DATE.
• Only files created by the active download are removed. Earlier versions attempted to delete the entire R session temporary directory.
• Network, HTTP, API, ZIP, and input failures now produce informative errors.
• Reference periods are parsed consistently and COORDINATE remains a character column.

Search

• Added statcan_find(), which interprets an English or French description of a subject, Canadian geography, and date range and returns ranked table candidates with an explanation of each match.
• Geography constraints are checked against official WDS table metadata. This metadata is cached for seven days, with graceful fallback when it cannot be refreshed.
• statcan_search() retrieves the official table catalogue from Statistics Canada’s Web Data Service instead of shipping a static data file.
• The catalogue is cached as an RDS file for 24 hours in the platform-specific user cache directory. A valid stale cache is used when WDS is temporarily unavailable.
• Searches are case-insensitive, require all supplied keywords, and return an empty table when there are no matches.
• Corrupt or incompatible catalogue caches are ignored and rebuilt.

Package and documentation

• Thierry Warin is the sole author and maintainer of this release.
• Removed unused package dependencies and the obsolete bundled catalogue.
• Moved tests into the standard tests/testthat structure and expanded unit coverage for Product IDs, dates, languages, catalogue responses, and search.
• Rebuilt the README, vignette, reference documentation, citation metadata, and pkgdown website.
• Added current GitHub Actions workflows for multi-platform R CMD check and automatic pkgdown deployment.

statcanR 0.2.6

• Fixed a server issue.

statcanR 0.2.5

• Removed top-level network access so the package can be installed offline.

statcanR 0.2.4

• Added statcan_search() to identify tables available from Statistics Canada.

statcanR 0.2.3

• Added an informative message when a table is unavailable.

statcanR 0.2.2

• Used readr::read_csv() for metadata tables.

statcanR 0.2.1

• Renamed the public functions to remove the previous sqs wording.