Fetch an Ontario SIU director's report by drid

Downloads the web page of one director's report of the Ontario Special Investigations Unit (SIU), the agency that investigates police interactions that end in death, serious injury or sexual-assault allegations, and saves its HTML to dest. Reports are identified by their drid number. If the live site does not answer, a copy from the Wayback Machine is used. This is the fetch step of the open SIU corpus pipeline: pair it with the SIU parser in this package (siufprs fetches and parses in one call; the compiled core under src/siu_*.cpp is the canonical implementation, and rmorie links to the same core) to rebuild the director's-report corpus yourself.

Usage

siufetch(drid, dest, lang = c("en", "fr"), wb = "", tmout = 120L)

Arguments

drid

Director's-report id: the drid= query parameter, one positive whole number (integer or integer-like, such as 648 or "648").

dest

Character string: the file to write the fetched HTML to.

lang

"en" (default) or "fr": the language of the report page.

wb

Optional explicit Wayback snapshot URL (passed through to blfetch); "" (the default) lets it discover one.

tmout

Request timeout in seconds. Default 120.

Value

"live" or "wayback" (invisibly), as blfetch: which source the HTML came from.

Details

The URL fetched is

https://www.siu.on.ca/<lang>/directors_report_details.php?drid=<drid>

through blfetch, which tries the live page first and falls back to a Wayback Machine snapshot (the one given in wb, or one it looks up).

Network: one or more HTTPS requests to www.siu.on.ca and, on failure, web.archive.org. Side effect: writes dest.

Errors, before any request: drid not one positive whole number (1.5 is refused rather than read as report 1); lang not "en" or "fr"; dest not a single non-empty string. Then any error from blfetch(), for example when neither the live page nor an archived copy can be reached.

See also

blfetch, siufprs

Examples

# the report number is checked before anything is sent
try(siufetch(1.5, tempfile(fileext = ".html")))
#> Error : `drid` must be one positive report number (the drid in the SIU report URL)
try(siufetch(648, tempfile(fileext = ".html"), lang = "de"))
#> Error : siufetch: `lang` must be one of "en", "fr", not "de"

# a real fetch needs the network (the SIU site or the Wayback Machine)
if (FALSE) { # interactive()
dest <- tempfile(fileext = ".html")
siufetch(648, dest)
siufetch(648, tempfile(fileext = ".html"), lang = "fr")
}