My ess package has be renamed to essurvey. For quite some time I’ve been pondering whether I should change the name. All of this comes from a dicussion we had on the R-pkg mailing list where many R users suggested that the name was unfortunate given that Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) has a long precedence in the R community and the names are very similar. Later on, when submitting the package to rOpensci, Jim Hester raised the fact once again, without being aware of the previous email thread.
Considering that I was already changing some of the functionalities of the package due to the rOpensci review, I decided to change the package name and republish an improved version of ess as essurvey 1.0.0. essurvey is now on CRAN and the repository has been moved to rOpensci’s github account.
The new package is mostly similar although there are now some deprecated functions and new features. Below are the main changes.
You can login once using set_email("your_email") and avoid rewriting your email in every call to the ess_* functions.
All ess_* functions have been deprecated in favour of similar import_* functions. For example:
ess_rounds(1:7)becomes..
import_rounds(1:7)But that’s the same you would say. The only difference is that with ess_rounds you could download data in Stata, SPSS or SAS formats directly. For that, there’s now the download_* functions.
download_rounds(
1:5,
output_dir = getwd(),
format = "spss"
)All of the above applies to ess_country and the ess_all_* functions. There’s also some other minor changes you can checkout in the NEWS file. If you haven’t tried essurvey, you can visit the package website for more detailed examples at https://ropensci.github.io/essurvey/.