The statsNZ package allows access to the StatisticsNZ API from within R.
This is very much a work in progress! The StatisticsNZ API is brand new and still in the testing phase.
This package will very likely change in the future!
statsNZ is not currently available from CRAN, but you can install it from github with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("jmarshallnz/statsNZ")
library(statsNZ)
#' Take a look at the expected what data are available
available_stats()
#' See what groups are available for the alcohol statistics
get_groups('ALC')
#' Fetch some statistics for the Litres of Beverage consumed
alc <- get_stats("ALC", "Litres of Beverage")
#' Some of this information is yearly totals rather than quarterly, so to
#' plot we first filter some stuff out
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
alc %>%
filter(substr(SeriesReference, 1, 4) != 'ALCQ') %>%
ggplot(aes(x=Period, y=DataValues)) +
geom_line(aes(colour=SeriesTitle1)) +
xlab("") +
ylab("Litres of Beverage") +
theme(legend.title = element_blank())