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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

statcanR 0.3.9

LLM providers

  • statcan_chat() gains a provider argument so you can choose which language-model provider to connect to. Two providers ship built in: "openai" (the default, unchanged behaviour) and "anthropic" (Claude). The "openai" provider also covers any OpenAI-compatible server – Groq, Together, OpenRouter, Mistral, vLLM, or a local open-source model served by Ollama or LM Studio – by pointing endpoint at it.

  • The endpoint now defaults to the chosen provider, so you no longer have to set it for OpenAI or Anthropic; only an API key and model are required.

  • The API key is now also read from the provider’s native environment variable (OPENAI_API_KEY or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY), in addition to the STATCANR_LLM_API_KEY variable and the api_key argument. As before, the key is never read from options(). For Anthropic the key is sent as an x-api-key header; for OpenAI it is sent as Authorization: Bearer.

  • New statcan_chat_continue() turns statcan_chat() into a multi-turn conversation: send a follow-up message (for example, an answer to the clarifying_question) and get an updated result. Follow-ups stay scoped to the candidate tables the first call already found – they never re-run statcan_find(), and the model still never proposes a table number of its own. Results are chainable, so you can keep answering. The API key is re-resolved on each call rather than stored in the result object.

statcanR 0.3.8

Data

  • statcan_data() and statcan_download_data() now return stable column types. A column that Statistics Canada leaves blank for a whole table (often DGUID, STATUS, SYMBOL, or TERMINATED) was previously read as a logical, all-NA column, so its type changed from table to table and could break rbind()/dplyr::bind_rows() or code expecting text. Such columns are now returned as empty character columns. Columns that carry real values, including reliability flags such as "E", "F", or "t", are unchanged.

Security

  • statcan_chat() now refuses to send your API key over an unencrypted connection. The endpoint must use https://, except for loopback hosts (for example, http://localhost for a local model), so a mistyped http:// endpoint can no longer leak the key in cleartext.

  • Breaking: the API key is no longer read from options(statcanR.llm_api_key = ). A secret placed in options() can be dumped with options(), saved with a session, or recorded in .Rhistory, so the key is now taken only from the STATCANR_LLM_API_KEY environment variable or the api_key argument. If you previously configured the option, switch to Sys.setenv(STATCANR_LLM_API_KEY = "...") (or pass api_key =); a stale option is ignored with a warning. The endpoint and model settings are unchanged and may still be set through options().

statcanR 0.3.7

Bug fixes

  • statcan_data() and statcan_download_data() again work for tables whose _MetaData.csv file contains several sections with differing column counts (for example, table 13-10-0837-01). The metadata reader now parses only the first section (the header and cube row), so data.table::fread() no longer stops early and reports the table as an empty data or metadata file (#8).

Performance

  • statcan_find() ranking is faster: the per-title term matching hoists its long-token filter out of the inner loop and vectorizes the prefix test, so it no longer scales with titles times query terms. Combined with the token cache from 0.3.6, a warm search dropped from roughly 2.4s to about 0.15s on the current catalogue.
  • Decoding HTML entities in catalogue titles now skips titles that contain no entity, avoiding repeated substitutions over the whole catalogue on every cache read.
  • Downloading a table no longer scans the reference-date column twice to detect fiscal-year periods.

statcanR 0.3.6

Performance

  • statcan_find() no longer re-tokenizes the entire table catalogue on every call. The per-title tokens are computed once and reused, both within a session and across sessions via a new cache file (statcan_catalogue_tokens.rds) stored alongside the cached catalogue. Repeat searches are roughly four times faster (about 2.4s to 0.6s on the current catalogue). The token cache is keyed on both the catalogue titles and the package version, so it is rebuilt automatically whenever the catalogue refreshes or the package is updated.

statcanR 0.3.5

Documentation

  • Documented how to access the candidates returned by statcan_chat(). A new README subsection and expanded statcan_chat() examples explain that the result carries the full ranked statcan_find() data frame in $candidates, and show how to feed result$candidates$id[1] straight into statcan_data() without retyping a table number.

statcanR 0.3.4

Chat (optional)

  • statcan_chat() now resolves its LLM endpoint, API key, and model before calling statcan_find(), so a missing configuration fails immediately instead of after a full catalogue lookup.

statcanR 0.3.3

Package and documentation

  • Documented statcan_chat() in the README: added it to the function overview table and a short “Optional: ask a language model for help” section, mirroring the vignette’s coverage.

statcanR 0.3.2

Chat (optional)

  • Added statcan_chat(), an optional layer over statcan_find() that sends the query and its ranked candidates to a user-configured, OpenAI-compatible chat-completions endpoint. The model explains the best match and asks a clarifying question when the query is ambiguous, but it can never invent a table number or reason over downloaded data — those always come from statcan_find() itself.
  • This feature adds no new package dependencies and makes no network request unless statcan_chat() is called directly. Configure the endpoint, API key, and model via function arguments, options(statcanR.llm_endpoint = , statcanR.llm_api_key = , statcanR.llm_model = ), or Sys.setenv(STATCANR_LLM_ENDPOINT = , STATCANR_LLM_API_KEY = , STATCANR_LLM_MODEL = ).

statcanR 0.3.1

Data access

  • Fixed statcan_data() and statcan_download_data() failing on real Statistics Canada tables with "Statistics Canada returned an empty data or metadata file". The metadata CSV’s trailing comma and multi-section structure confused column detection; parsing is now tolerant of the extra field.

Search

  • Table titles returned by statcan_find() and statcan_search() now display HTML/XML characters normally (for example, R&D instead of R&D).
  • Existing catalogue caches are corrected automatically when they are read.
  • statcan_find() recognizes Canada’s major Census Metropolitan Areas (for example, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) as geography constraints, in addition to provinces and territories.
  • statcan_find() expands common acronyms (GDP, CPI, PPI/IPPI, and the French PIB, IPC) to their spelled-out form so queries such as "GDP by industry" match tables whose titles spell the term out in full.

statcanR 0.3.0

CRAN release: 2026-07-17

Compatibility

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

CRAN release: 2023-08-17

  • Fixed a server issue.

statcanR 0.2.5

CRAN release: 2023-08-10

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

statcanR 0.2.4

CRAN release: 2023-03-03

statcanR 0.2.3

CRAN release: 2021-12-14

  • Added an informative message when a table is unavailable.

statcanR 0.2.2

statcanR 0.2.1

CRAN release: 2021-03-03

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