I pull a lot of census data at my day job. This especially applies to the American Community Survey (ACS). This survey replaced the decennial census “long form” and provides a staggering amount of data. We use this data to create community profiles. So every December when the Census Bureau releases the 5-year estimates I spend a good deal of time downloading data.
But today I think I have a way to significantly cut this time down. I brushed off my python skills and wrote a little script to pull the data from the Census API. As you might recall I use both Python and R in my work using the best tool for the job. This time I used Python to get the job done.
This Python script is important to me as it was my first real foray with Pandas. My previous experience with R’s data frames made the transition pretty smooth. I also used Spyder as my development environment. While it is not as awesome as RStudio, it wasn’t bad.
As always, this Python script is posted to my GitHub repository.
The Budding Data Scientist 
Hey Mike,
I just wanted to say thanks for posting your script on GitHub. I used it as a starting point to help automate some of my work mapping ACS data relating to underserved populations and Title 6 at an MPO. Thanks again!
Mike
Mike – I’m So glad you found it helpful! I love the ACS! Such a rich data set.
Cool blog. Great code.
Thanks!
Thanks Mike! Made my work much easier.
Glad you found it useful
Hello. I got this error:
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte 0x93 in position 15: invalid start byte
Try changing the read_csv() command. Adding something like encoding = “ISO-8859-1” should resolve the error.