Expansion of tidy function to all other package functions and improved speed and quality.
Fixed errors in mnis_extra that prevented it from functioning properly.
Improved handling of deprecated functions.
New mnis_all_members function that returns all members from both houses, with various options accepted as function parameters.
The old function names were awkward. The new ones are all lower case and use underscores to separate individual words. All old function names have been deprecated, but can still be called.
mnis_eligible returns a data frame with information on all members eligible or previously eligible to sit in the House of Lords, the House of Commons, or both.
The Members' Names Information Service returns variables names with extra text, including periods, @ signs and superfluous text stuck on the end of names. The tidy parameter gives an option to remove this extra text.
mnis_JoinedBetween returns a data frame with information on all members who joined the House of Lords, the House of Commons, or both, between two given dates.
As the Members' Names Information Service has dozens of different search parameters and hundreds of possible combinations of searches, it is not reasonable to build functions for every possible query to the API. However, I will be rolling out functions for potentially common queries as and when I can. If you have any particular queries you would like functions for please let me know and I'll create it.
This is the first release of the mnis package, which provides functions to download data from the Members' Names Information Service for the UK Houses of Parliament.
See the package documentation for details on each function and the type of data available.