NEWS

statcanR 0.3.0 (2026-07-17)

Existing calls to statcan_search(), statcan_data(), and statcan_download_data() remain supported.
statcan_data() and statcan_download_data() now accept either a hyphenated table number such as "27-10-0014-01" or an eight-digit Product ID such as "27100014".
statcan_download_data() gains an optional path argument. Its original two-argument form continues to save a CSV file in the working directory.

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.

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.

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.