Finding the right table • estatr

The single biggest friction point with e-Stat is finding the statsDataId for the table you actually want. This article covers the three routes estatr gives you: curated shortcuts, friendly search, and the low-level list endpoint.

Curated shortcuts

For the handful of tables most people want first, there is a named shortcut so you never touch a statsDataId:

estat_curated_tables()

get_labour_force_survey(limit = 500)
get_family_income_survey(limit = 500)

# Or by key
get_estat_curated("regional_statistics", limit = 500)

Entries whose statsDataId is NA are recognised names that have not yet been curated to a specific table — use search (below) for those, or open an issue to help curate them.

Friendly search

search_estat() wraps the catalog search and returns a tibble with the most useful columns renamed to stable snake_case (id, stat_name, title, gov_org, survey_date, …) and moved to the front:

# Keyword search (Japanese or English terms)
search_estat("国勢調査")

# Combine terms; restrict to recently updated tables
search_estat("労働力調査 AND 都道府県", updated_from = "2023")

Once you have an id, inspect its structure before pulling data (see vignette("data-model")):

meta <- estat_meta_info("0003217721")
names(meta) # the classification axes
meta$cat01 # the labels/codes for the first category axis

Low-level listing

For full control over the raw getStatsList parameters, use estat_stats_list() directly:

estat_stats_list(
  searchWord = "家計調査",
  statsCode = "00200561",
  limit = 20
)

Discovering downloadable files

Some resources are published as Excel/CSV/PDF rather than as queryable data. estat_data_catalog() finds those:

estat_data_catalog(searchWord = "国勢調査", limit = 10)