get inmate data for wake county, nc

wake-forest-inmate-data.R

# variables
OUTPUT_DIR = "~/Dropbox/Jails/data")

DATE <- format(Sys.time(), '%Y-%m-%d')
FILENAME <- sprintf("%s-wake-county-records.csv", DATE)
url <- 'http://p2c.wakeso.net/jqHandler.ashx?op=s'

# set up form request
# query found using Chrome developer tools.
# Ran Query > Go to "Network" tab > find "jqHandler.ashx?op=s"
# Then, find "Request URL" (top) and "Form Data" (bottom)
body <- list(
  t = "ii",
  "_search" = "false",
  rows = 10000, # gets all rows
  page = 1,
  sidx = "disp_name",
  sord = "asc"
)

r <- httr::POST(url, body = body, encoding = 'form', httr::verbose()) # sending form data request

tbl <- httr::content(r, "parsed", "application/json") %>% # data is in json
  '$'('rows') %>% # what we want is in the 'rows' array
  lapply(., tibble::as.tibble) %>% # convert each row to a dataframe
  dplyr::bind_rows() # stack

readr::write_csv(tbl, file.path(OUTPUT_DIR, FILENAME))