I needed some demographics data earlier this week and tried using the SF3 files from census.gov’s “Census 2000″ data set.
What a time sink. Ugh.
The methods used are very well documented, and I learned a lot about the census. What I was not able to learn, however, was how to actually extract the data from the flat files. Look at what Joshua Tauberer went through to get some idea of the pain level.
Finally I got fed up and wrote a screen scraper for ZIPskinny.com in Perl. It’s one-off crappy code. You can get it from CPAN under namespace Geo::Demo::Zipskinny.
Hope it saves you some time. Leave me a comment if you have working code that can deal with SF3 files.
Here’s a little ZIP code to rich-vs-poor plot I made earlier.
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