URL Helper Function

[TheCedarPrince]

Issue Description

Difficulty: Advanced Beginner

Time: 10 - 20 hours

Description: Create a Julia function that can construct URLs for downloading shapefiles from the TIGER database based on various parameters such as year, resolution, and other attributes. See the link to data files here: https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html

Notes: Although this task may take some time, I should note that the method for the initial implementation for one of these types could probably be repeated for the rest of these data types resulting in this maybe taking less time than anticipated.

Requirements

For each data type as follows:

• ADDR
• ADDRFEAT
• ADDRFN
• AIANNH
• AITSN
• ANRC
• AREALM
• AREAWATER
• BG
• CBSA
• CD
• COASTLINE
• CONCITY
• COUNTY
• COUSUB
• CSA
• EDGES
• ELSD
• ESTATE
• FACES
• FACESAH
• FACESAL
• FACESMIL
• FEATNAMES
• INTERNATIONALBOUNDARY
• LINEARWATER
• METDIV
• MIL
• PLACE
• POINTLM
• PRIMARYROADS
• PRISECROADS
• PUMA
• RAILS
• ROADS
• SCSD
• SDADM
• SLDL
• SLDU
• STATE
• SUBBARRIO
• TABBLOCK20
• TBG
• TRACT
• TTRACT
• UAC
• UNSD
• ZCTA520

The following needs to be performed:

• Build URLs for different years of Census data, considering:

  • Pre-2000 census data (1990, 2000) with suffixes st99_d and st
  • Post-2013 census data with year-specific suffixes
  • Other years with specific URL formats
  • See this as an example of the complicated nature of building URLs: https://github.com/walkerke/tigris/blob/master/R/states.R

• Support various resolution options for each year (500k, 5m, 20m)

Expected Outcomes

The created Julia function should:

1. Generate a valid URL for downloading shapefiles from the TIGER database based on the provided parameters (year, resolution, etc.)
2. Handle different years and formats for constructing URLs
3. Support the different URLs needed to be constructed per datatype
4. Provide flexibility in formatting URLs based on user preferences or configurations

[TheCedarPrince]

From @00krishna:

One thing we may need to include is a description of how the user knows which shapefile to download. Like I think that there is a correspondence between the IPUMS data extract and which TIGER gis file matches that extract. So is the user going to put the name of the file in themselves, or would they just put in the extract file as an argument, and then the function would figure out which TIGER file is the correct one?

This is a good point but I think we can simplify this interface sufficiently not to have to manually construct the query URL every single time.

[asinghvi17]

I guess this is almost done? We just need an interface for the year causing the filename to shift.