problem with imf_ids

[JulianVeit]

Hey!

I first tried to get data via the IMFData package and few days ago it worked perfectly fine but now I have a error message when trying to request the data.
That is why I then tried the 'imfr' package. I downloaded it from the CRAN archive by using

library(devtools)
install_url('https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/imfr/imfr_0.1.9.1.tar.gz')

When requesting the list of database_IDs with

library(imfr)
imf_ids(return_raw = FALSE, times = 3)

Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle): Recv failure: Connection was reset
Request failed [ERROR]. Retrying in 1.9 seconds...
Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle): Recv failure: Connection was reset
Request failed [ERROR]. Retrying in 2.8 seconds...
Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle) :
Recv failure: Connection was reset

then a very similar error message appears as when using the IMFData package.

Any advise on how to fix this or comment is appreciated a lot!

Best regards

Julian

[cjyetman]

I got the error too, but eventually it worked...

imf_ids(return_raw = FALSE, times = 3)
#> Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle): Operation was aborted by an application callback
#> Request failed [ERROR]. Retrying in 1.1 seconds...
#>   |=========================================================================================================| 100%
#> # A data frame: 259 × 2
#>    database_id   description                                                                                       
#>  * <chr>         <chr>                                                                                             
#>  1 BOP_2017M06   Balance of Payments (BOP), 2017 M06                                                               
#>  2 BOP_2020M3    Balance of Payments (BOP), 2020 M03                                                               
#>  3 BOP_2017M11   Balance of Payments (BOP), 2017 M11                                                               
#>  4 DOT_2020Q1    Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS), 2020 Q1                                                     
#>  5 GFSMAB2016    Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY 2016), Main Aggregates and Balances                  
#>  6 BOP_2019M12   Balance of Payments (BOP), 2019 M12                                                               
#>  7 GFSYFALCS2014 Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY 2014), Financial Assets and Liabilities by Counterpa…
#>  8 GFSE2016      Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY 2016), Expense                                       
#>  9 FM201510      Fiscal Monitor (FM) October 2015                                                                  
#> 10 GFSIBS2016    Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY 2016), Integrated Balance Sheet (Stock Positions and…
#> # … with 249 more rows
#> # ℹ Use `print(n = ...)` to see more rows

Seems like IMF's server is having trouble responding today.

FYI... both of the IMF packages appear to be "abandoned", meaning the primary developer/s and/or the people that have admin access to the repos have not been active here/there in quite some time, which is why they both have been archived and removed from CRAN, because the maintainers have not responded to requests from CRAN.

[JulianVeit]

Ok thanks a lot for your response, you are helping me out a lot!

Also thanks for the info about the packages. I was wondering how it could be that there seems to be no up-to-date / active package for retrieving data from IMF into R. It seems to me that there should be many people who need exactly a package like this. Do you know how most people actually get the data from IMF into R, people who are working in research institutes etc. ? Are they still relying on this "old" or at least not maintained packages or is there a common / convenient alternative? Or is everyone coding the API requests themselves?

Would be very thankful for any comment on this!

Best
Julian

[cjyetman]

Can't speak for anyone else, but I have mainly accessed their JSON API directly