Downloads press freedom index CSV files from Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
for specified years. Files are saved as-is (unmodified) with consistent
naming (rwb<year>.csv).
Arguments
- years
Integer vector. Years to download. Defaults to
2002:2026.- output_dir
Character. Directory path where CSV files will be saved. Required (no default) so the function never writes to a package or home directory implicitly. Directory is created if it doesn't exist.
- skip_missing
Logical. If
TRUE, automatically skips year 2011 (no official RSF data published). Defaults toTRUE.
Value
Invisibly returns a named list where names are years and values indicate success/failure status. Called for side effects (downloading files).
Details
RSF publishes press freedom index data at a per-year URL, e.g. for 2024:
https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/import_classement/2024.csv
Substitute the target year for 2024 to get other years' data.
**Encoding Handling:**
Files are downloaded as raw bytes (utils::download.file(mode = "wb"))
and written to disk unmodified. No parsing, re-encoding, or re-serialization
happens at download time, so whatever bytes RSF serves (RSF has used both
UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1/Latin-1 depending on the year, without warning) are
preserved exactly as-is. Encoding is detected later, per file, when the data
is cleaned (see detect_csv_encoding()).
An earlier version of this function read each file with
readr::read_delim() using a period-based encoding guess and then
re-wrote it with readr::write_delim(). That round-trip silently
corrupted the 2002-2021 files (which are actually UTF-8, not ISO-8859-1 as
assumed): text was double-encoded and numeric columns like Score N
were mis-parsed (commas treated as thousands separators, e.g. "92,48"
became 9248). Downloading raw bytes avoids this class of bug entirely.
Year 2011 is not available; no imputation is performed. If
skip_missing = TRUE, the function automatically filters out 2011
before downloading.
Error Handling: - Connection failures are logged but don't stop the function - HTTP 404 errors (missing years) are logged as warnings - File write permission errors are caught and reported