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Update

This is version 0.3.9, a maintenance and feature update from the current CRAN release (0.3.0). The three long-standing public functions and their required arguments are unchanged. Since 0.3.0 the package:

  • adds statcan_chat(), an optional layer over statcan_find() that asks a user-configured language-model provider to explain the ranked candidates. It never invents or chooses a table number; those always come from statcan_find(). A provider argument selects the provider: "openai" (the default, which also covers any OpenAI-compatible or local server) or "anthropic" (Claude).
  • adds statcan_chat_continue(), which continues a statcan_chat() result as a multi-turn conversation. Follow-ups stay scoped to the candidate tables the first call found; they do not re-run statcan_find(), and the API key is re-resolved per call rather than stored in the result object.
  • fixes statcan_data() and statcan_download_data() for tables whose _MetaData.csv file has several sections with differing column counts, which could previously cause a valid table to be reported as empty.
  • returns stable column types: a column left blank for a whole table (for example DGUID, STATUS, SYMBOL, or TERMINATED) is now an empty character column rather than a logical, all-NA column whose type varied between tables.
  • speeds up statcan_find() by caching per-title tokens and streamlining the ranking, without changing the ranking results.

Internet access

As in 0.3.0, the package performs no Internet access during installation, package loading, examples, tests, or vignette builds. Network requests occur only when a user explicitly calls one of the data-discovery or data-access functions; each request uses a timeout and fails gracefully with an informative error when the service is unavailable or returns an unexpected response. Catalogue and metadata lookups reuse the most recent valid user cache when the service is unavailable.

statcan_chat() follows the same rule: it makes no request unless the user calls it directly, and it requires a user-supplied API key and model (the endpoint defaults to the chosen provider). No third-party service is contacted automatically. For safety the endpoint must use https:// (except loopback hosts for a local model), and the API key is read only from an argument or an environment variable (STATCANR_LLM_API_KEY, or the provider's native OPENAI_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY), never from options().

Thierry Warin is the sole author and maintainer. There is no change of maintainer or maintainer email address from the last CRAN release.

Test environments

  • Local: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, R 4.6.0 (R CMD check --as-cran)
  • GitHub Actions: macOS (release), Windows (release), and Ubuntu (R-devel, release, and oldrel-1) -- all passing
  • win-builder, R-release (R 4.6.1): OK -- 0 errors | 0 warnings | 0 notes
  • win-builder, R-devel (R Under development, 2026-07-24 r90297): OK -- 0 errors | 0 warnings | 0 notes

R CMD check results

0 errors | 0 warnings | 0 notes on the GitHub Actions runners and on both win-builder checks listed above.

The local Linux R CMD check --as-cran reports 1 warning and 2 notes, all of which are artifacts of that machine's incomplete manual-building toolchain, not package issues, and do not occur on the GitHub Actions runners or on CRAN:

  • WARNING when building the PDF manual: LaTeX package inconsolata.sty is not installed on the local machine.
  • NOTE that HTML manual validation is skipped because no tidy binary is present.
  • NOTE about a leftover statcanR-manual.tex, a byproduct of the failed local PDF build above.

checking CRAN incoming feasibility returned OK, and all substantive checks (R code, examples, tests, and vignette re-building) pass cleanly.

Downstream dependencies

statcanR has no reverse dependencies on CRAN (checked with tools::package_dependencies(reverse = TRUE) against the current CRAN snapshot), so this update affects no other package. The public function names and existing required arguments are unchanged.